United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

The UNODC Regional Office in East Africa (ROEA)

Addis Ababa Rehabilitation Centre moves from paper to electronic filing 

UNODC gave away three computers to the Addis Ababa Rehabilitation Centre, an institution that houses between 75 and 150 Ethiopian children in conflict with the law, on 10 August. The donation is part of an ambitious project to develop a computerized database to keep track of the children population at the Centre.

UNODC's technical assistance in developing and implementing the database will allow the centre to store personal, detention and programming information securely and efficiently.

So far, information on the children at the Centre had been managed and organized manually from the individual files, which prevented the Centre from systematically recording crucial information needed to help determine its needs and those of the children.

The database, on the other hand, is designed to contain critical information such as date of admission, court adjournment date, and other important information like gender, age, place of origin, type of offence and number of previous admissions to the Centre, meaning that programmes can be tailored accordingly.

UNODC's experts are working to ensure that the database meets the statistical standards in crime and criminal justice. This way indicators from the database will easily be shared with other crime and criminal justice statistical databases.