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Break-out Session I.3: Performance lessons from Merankabandi II, Burundi

Break-out Session I.3: Performance lessons from Merankabandi II, Burundi

Type of contribution: 45 min break-out session

(Full) session title:

Scaling openIMIS/CORE-MIS to national-programme volumes. Performance lessons from Merankabandi II, Burundi // Merankabandi II project and World Bank Group

 

Presenters:

  • W. Anthony B. Belem, Consultant / World Bank Group

  • Fleury Ininahazawe, Head of Information Systems / Projet d'Appui aux Filets Sociaux Productifs et Emplois, MERANKABANDI, Cash for Jobs

Note-Taker (Documentation):

  • …

  • …

 

Description:

Merankabandi II operates one of the largest CORE-MIS deployments in francophone Africa, supporting a country-wide caseload across the cash transfer and complementary measures pipelines. As the registry, payment, and M&E volumes have grown, the team has had to confront a familiar set of scaling questions head-on: where does CORE-MIS bend before it breaks, and which interventions actually move the needle in production?

This session shares the concrete engineering decisions - and trade-offs - that the Merankabandi II team has made over the past project cycle. We focus on what is reusable by other country teams running comparable volumes, and we expose what remains hard or unsolved, in the hope that the community can carry the conversation further.

What attendees will take away

  • Performance hotspots we encountered: payment request generation, beneficiary search, JSONB-heavy queries, and report aggregation.

  • PostgreSQL playbook that helped us most: targeted indexing strategy on JSONB beneficiary attributes, materialized views for payment, and query rewriting to eliminate N+1 patterns in the Django ORM layer.

  • Celery / RabbitMQ to move heavy operations (payment list generation, batch reconciliation, exports) out of the request cycle, and the operational lessons learned (idempotency, retries).

  • Docker build and deployment optimizations for the CORE-MIS frontend and backend in environments with limited bandwidth.

  • Field perspective from the project team on how these technical changes translated into day-to-day operational improvements

  • Open questions we would like to take to the community: shared roadmap items, candidates for upstream contribution, and benchmark baselines worth standardizing across country deployments.

 

Related inputs during the Community Meeting:

 

Background:

Burundi - openIMIS - openIMIS Wiki