In March 2025, the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) commissioned Synergy to design, develop, and deploy a Referral Management System (RMS) for Somalia in support of more coordinated delivery of humanitarian services across Protection, Economic Recovery, Camp Coordination & Camp Management, WASH, Shelter & Infrastructure, Climate Action, Humanitarian Disarmament & Peacebuilding, Food Sector and Livelihood sectors. The envisioned RMS will replace fragmented, manual referral processes with standardized digital workflows. The system will form part of DRC’s broader RESPOND information management environment and support DRC staff and external partner agencies working across Somalia.
Referral information across Somalia’s humanitarian response has long been scattered across external platforms, spreadsheets, and disconnected databases, limiting visibility, oversight, routing control, and timely follow-up action. The new engagement positions Synergy to help DRC close these gaps by building a nationally scoped digital platform that digitizes the full referral lifecycle from initial identification through to case closure.
Under this engagement, Synergy will work with DRC to design a system built around a unified digital registry for beneficiaries and households, giving caseworkers a single, reliable record to work from rather than the scattered files used today. On top of that registry, the RMS will support two-way referral communication both within DRC’s own sectors and with external partner agencies, so that a referral can be tracked and followed up on regardless of which organization ultimately handles it. Referrals themselves will be routed dynamically to the appropriate sector or agency based on real-time service availability, helping ensure that beneficiaries are directed to partners actually equipped to assist them.
Recognizing that much of DRC’s referral work happens in areas with limited or no connectivity, the system will also be designed to let field staff capture and update referral data offline, with secure synchronization back to the central platform once an internet connection is restored. Finally, the RMS will include analytical dashboards and audit trails, giving DRC and its partners the oversight, accountability, and decision-making support needed to manage referrals at scale.
The RMS will be developed on Synergy Auxilium platform, using microservices architecture designed for scalability and resilience. The solution is planned to support both a web-based system and an offline-capable Android application, allowing field workers to continue referral work in low-connectivity environments and sync data back to the central platform once online access is available.
Synergy International Systems, Inc. (“Synergy”) is a software development and consulting tech company built on hard work, dedication, and a commitment to excellence. Founded in 1997, we have worked in more than 80 countries to help organizations and governments to become more data driven. We are a privately held, 170+ person company headquartered in the Washington, D.C. metro area, USA, with a Development and Global Learning Center in Armenia, and offices in the Netherlands and Rwanda. Synergy has achieved ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and ISO 9001:2015 to certify its Information Security and Quality Management Systems (ISMS and QMS).
