Bridge the Digital Divide with AI: AWS + Vasion, a Partnership for Good
Vasion Co-Founder and CEO Ryan Wedig, and BASICS International Founder and Executive Director Patricia Wilkins, met at AWS’s re:Invent session in December of 2023 and a shared vision quickly emerged: an opportunity to bridge the digital divide with AI and simultaneously improve efficiency for a mission-driven organization. A year later, Patricia, Ryan, and Vasion Chief Product and Technology Officer Corey Ercanbrack, are back to discuss the outcomes of that partnership at a breakout session moderated by Vivian Okere from Amazon Web services.
See How This Partnership Unfolded:
Identifying 4 Key Process Challenges
Vasion and BASICS identified and automated four key process challenges and goals:

Sponsor Application
Automate the way BASICS signs-up children for the program with digital input and processing, to simplify interactions.

Sponsorship Application
Collect necessary information with ease and automatically match a sponsor to a child.

Progress Reports
Keep the sponsor engaged and active in their matched child’s experience with progress reports, updates, and personal communication.

Child/Sponsor Communication
Ensure communication between sponsor and child is safe and protected. AI redaction of PII (personal identifying information), phone numbers, addresses or other sensitive information.
It was all paperwork. We went out in the community with clipboards and paperwork. Now thanks to this great software, we go out into the community with a tablet, we collect that information and it creates a story.
—Patricia Wilkings, BASICS Founder and Executive Director
Establishing Workflows with AWS AI for Safety and Efficiency
Prior to partnering with Vasion, facilitating communication from child to sponsor was entirely manual for BASICS. Handwritten letters were manually proofed for safety and content, then edited and typed, and sent on to the child or sponsor. The process was time consuming and definitely not scalable.
Vasion built digital processes and automated workflows for the BASICS team to eliminate manual uploading and reviewing of photos, documents, and communications, saving them hours of time. And by harnessing the power of AWS Rekognition and AWS Comprehend inside workflows, preserved and protected the safety and personal information of the children while making communication fast and efficient.

Accelerating Digitization to Focus on What Matters: Improving Lives
Backed by Amazon integrations, Vasion’s partnership with BASICS International is transforming the way the organization operates, making processes faster, safer, and more efficient through automation and AI-driven innovation. By accessing the digital tools available inside the Vasion automation platform, BASICS is not only streamlining processes and securing communication between children and sponsors, they are recovering time and resources to focus on what matters most: improving lives through education and building brighter futures.

As a non-profit, we’re looking at all ways to save money, so if we don’t have to spend money on printers and paper, that’s a win that we can put into programs now. That’s more rice that we can buy, more tinned tomatoes, more bananas that we can buy. So that’s a great win/win for us.
—Patricia Wilkings, BASICS Founder and Executive Director
Imagine what automation and AI could do for your organization.
Book a demo today and discover how Vasion can help you achieve your goals.
About BASICS
BASICS is a boots on the ground organization dedicated to promoting equitable access to education and opportunities to improve the lives of the people and communities they serve, primarily in Accra and Chorkor, Ghana.
Education is our priority. If you have no education, then you have no dreams. You don’t even know what’s out there.
—Patricia Wilkings, BASICS Founder and Executive Director