We solve international development problems

We have years of experience in community development in the Global South, information technology, and education sectors.

Overview

Nile Point is a San Francisco-based consulting firm founded in 2013 by Emmet Murphy and Trishan de Lanerolle. With a focus on food security and project management in the global south, plus mobile/web applications to service those needs, Nile Point has grown into a development consulting and software development firm that brings international field experience and Silicon Valley technology to local communities, governments, private sector players, and humanitarian organizations in developing countries.

We are development practitioners, engineers and UX designers who have tackled many of the challenges you face in the most remote and poorest places of the world. More than thirty years of combined experience in information technology, education, and hard work on the ground in developing countries give our management team a unique outlook to real-world problem solving. We use the Agile method to quickly gain feedback on tailored M&E web applications through ongoing interactions with the client. Our working products respond to changes identified by all users based on their experience to create a holistic, intuitive user experience.

Our Story

Early evening on January 12, 2010, Emmet Murphy was driving in the mountains between Port au Prince and Jacmel on Haiti’s southern coast when a violent shake nearly forced his car off the road. A massive dust plume rose from the valley below, he thought it was an avalanche. Within forty-eight hours, he and his team had been thrown into the relief effort of one of the greatest humanitarian disasters in history.

Emmet had been living in Haiti for the previous two years managing a USAID food security project. Between his small operation in Port au Prince where an estimated 250,000 people lost their lives, and Jacmel, where the death toll was just over 1,000, his organization and others managed the distribution of food and other materials to hundreds of thousands of people over the following three months and then ongoing cash-for-work and complementary distribution structures to support the recovery process.

Though they had created a local database for their existing program, they had been registering farmers, workers, mothers and families with paper and pen, but the enormous scale of the new need for aid forced them to search for more efficient ways to register families affected by the disaster in remote areas. This challenge spurred Emmet and his team to engage the Humanitarian Free Open Source Software group based at Trinity College to collaborate on a mobile solution to register people remotely and relay the data via text message to their local server.

In 2013 the former project director of HFOSS, Trishan de Lanerolle, and Emmet Murphy founded Nile Point to bring their experience in technology and international development to agencies working in remote areas. Since launching Nile Point, they have worked with CARE in Haiti to create a cloud-based monitoring and evaluation platform for field workers to record and report data for a USAID food security project. They also worked with Food for the Hungry to create a delay tolerant network to capture data in remote areas of Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo where they manage food security programs that support over a half a million people.

Our Vision

We design strategy that is informed by past lessons and builds resilience within communities. We believe that effective rural development has the most impact when remotely-based field teams have access to training and tools adapted to work in the toughest environments.

Emmet Murphy

Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Emmet is a food security expert with over 20 years of experience in Africa, the Middle East and Caribbean. He managed multi-year, large scale development and relief operations in Haiti and Uganda and consults for various NGOs and donors related to food security, market analysis and proposal writing. Mr. Murphy has an M.A. in international political economy and development and he speaks French, Lithuanian and is proficient in Haitian Creole.

Trishan de Lanerolle

Co-Founder and Senior Advisor for Technology and Platforms

Trishan has led the development efforts of several open source software applications for disaster management and humanitarian response. He was the co-founder and director of the Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Project (HFOSS) at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut. And a founding member of the Sahana Software Foundation. He has a BS in Computer Science from and an MS in Management of Innovation and Technology.

Dr. Anna Afferri

Senior Consultant for Health and Nutrition

Anna is a technical expert in international health and nutrition with over 15 years of experience in Africa, Asia and Caribbean. She has expertise in adult and child nutrition, primary health care, family planning, maternal and reproductive health, including emergency obstetric care. Dr. Afferri has worked on short and long-term development projects in Haiti and DRC, Gabon, Tibet, Algeria and Angola. She has a master’s degree in public health, a medical degree in obstetrics and speaks Italian, English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.

Gardy Fleurantin

Senior Agronomist

Gardy is a Haitian agronomist, Soil Scientist and Monitoring & Evaluation specialist with more than 30 years of experience. He has undertaken research on tuber and root production, and seed production and has managed long-term food security and agricultural projects in Haiti. Mr. Fleurantin has extensive experience in survey design and implementation, and the Farming System Research and Extension approach, food security and environmental degradation issues. He is fluent in English and Spanish and speaks native French and Haitian Creole.

Dirk Kloss

Senior Environmental Consultant

Dirk is a conservation and carbon finance leader with over 20 years of experience in biodiversity conservation, forestry, and climate change. He has managed a land-based carbon projects in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and worked for GIZ, the World Bank, the Global Environmental Facility, UNDP, and was Managing Director of Terra Global Capital. He has an M.Sc. in economic geography and published research on innovative conservation finance and speaks German, English, French and Spanish.

Johan Razafiarison

Senior Food Security and Operations Manager Consultant

Johan Razafiarison has over 20 years of management experience, including seven years in the private sector and 15 years with relief and development programs. He has proven competency in diverse USAID project financial and contract management, financial and line management experience. He has worked for Catholic Relief Services (CRS), ACDI/VOCA, World Vision and Abt Associates Inc in Madagascar, Zambia, Kenya, Burundi, Tanzania, Haiti, Mauritania and Burkina Faso. Johan holds a Master’s Degree in Agricultural Economics. He speaks English and French.

Ralph Morelli

Senior Advisor for Technology and Education

Dr. Ralph Morelli is Professor of Computer Science Emeritus at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, where he has been teaching CS since 1985. He oversaw the NSF-funded Mobile-CSP and Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Projects (HFOSS), an attempt to help revitalize undergraduate computing education by getting students engaged in building software that benefits society. He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy and an M.S. in Information and Computer Science from the University of Hawaii.

Aynne Valencia

Senior UX Designer

Aynne is a creative design leader with over eighteen years of professional digital design experience who has crafted breakthrough, award-winning cross-platform experiences for clients such as University of Phoenix, McDonalds, SunTrust Bank, Visa, Wachovia, Nike and Nile Point. She was Microsoft’s Lead Product Designer on the Hardware Incubation teams, Digital Product Design Director in digital advertising at AKQA, Design Lead for the Cisco Flip Camera, Service Design Lead at Fjord, and Associate Creative Director of R/GA. Ms. Valencia serves as Chair of the Interaction Design Program and Associate Professor at California College of the Arts.

Elizabeth Ibarra

Designer

Elizabeth is an experienced designer with a demonstrated history of working in start-up environments. Skilled in Wire-framing, Prototyping, UX design, and Visuals design. She graduated from California College of the Arts with a BFA in Interaction Design.

Claudia Trafton

Mobile Developer

Claudia is a software developer who believes in innovation and the power of technology for the greater good. She has developed mobile applications for the insurance sector and assisted in the development of xIndicate. Claudia has a B.S. in Computer Science and is in the process of earning her M.S. in Computer Science at Syracuse University.

Eldivert Savoit

Senior IT Consultant

Eldivert is a management information system specialist who has managed client/server-based information systems, web system design, network systems design, implementation, administration, web radio Implementation and installation. He earned a BS in Computer Sciences from Institut Universitaire Quisqueya Amerique (INUQUA) in Haiti, a Certificate in International Human Resource from Cornell University and a Law Certificate from Haiti State University. He is fluent in French, English and Creole.

Kurt Opprecht

Senior Content Advisor

Kurt Opprecht is a writer who has written for The Economist, The New York Times, The New York Sun, World Art and Look Japan, among many others. Corporate clients have included General Electric, ACDI/VOCA and Google. He earned his BA in Philosophy at Reed College, and a Communication Major from Southern Utah University. In addition to his native English, he speaks French and Japanese.