A custom portal built from the ground up for the Sharjah Publishing Sustainability Fund. Three programme tracks, a five-step guided application, a single review workflow and a super admin layer run across seven integrated modules, in Arabic and English, on desktop and mobile.
Applicants managed through the portal
Application time, down from up to 3 days
Review team, same throughput
Applications arrive by email, and supporting documents such as pitch decks, business licences and financial summaries sit scattered across inboxes with no single record per applicant. At national scale the process still works, but only through manual effort that grows with every submission received.
Because each track carries its own criteria, application flow, review path and cycle. Onshur runs Launch for new publishers, Scale for established publishers and Disrupt for technology-driven startups, and a generic form has no structure to hold three distinct sets of requirements without collapsing them into one.
On this programme, around three days of back and forth per application, handled by five team members tracking approvals, rejections and follow-ups by hand. The time is consumed by coordination rather than assessment, and it repeats in full for every application received.
Because without it, every question becomes a message to the team. Publishers could not see where their application stood, save a draft or resubmit without contacting Onshur directly, so the administrative load of the programme included answering questions the system should have answered itself.
Because the community it serves works in both languages, and partial coverage excludes part of it. Every form, screen and notification has to function in Arabic and English, which is a requirement of the build rather than a translation task applied to a finished platform.
Yes. Borders & Gates designed and built Onshur's application and programme management portal from the ground up, covering the full programme lifecycle in seven integrated modules: applications, review, support tickets, knowledge base, notifications, users and roles, and activity logs.
Launch, Scale and Disrupt each run with their own cycle, criteria and status flow inside a single platform. Track configuration is built into the system rather than hard-coded, so a new programme track is set up in around 20 minutes without development work.
Five steps, covering basic information, team, project details, financials and document upload, with save-as-draft, replacing an eight-step long-tail form. Applicants also get a personal dashboard carrying live status on each application, news and updates, and quick actions.
An admin console with live statistics per track, a filterable applications queue, and a single review screen carrying Approve, Reject and Request More Info. Above it sits a super admin layer for users, roles, system settings, activity logs and system health alerts, so operational control and programme review are separated by design.
Yes. The portal runs in Arabic and English with mirrored layouts across every screen, on desktop and mobile. Support tickets, a knowledge base and targeted notifications by track and status are built into the same platform, so applicant communication runs inside the portal rather than alongside it.
More than 3,000 applicants have been managed through the portal, on desktop and mobile. The programme now runs at national scale on one system of record rather than across inboxes and spreadsheets.
Application time fell to around 8 minutes, down from up to three days of email exchange. Submission is instant and the applicant sees live status afterwards, so the exchange that used to constitute the process no longer needs to happen.
In about 20 minutes, down from 10 days. Because track configuration is a system setting rather than a build, the programme can open a new track at the speed the initiative decides to, not at the speed of development.
The review team was optimised from five members to two. Approvals, rejections and follow-ups run through a single review screen with live status per submission, so the coordination effort that required five people is absorbed by the workflow itself.
One portal covers every track, with instant submission, save-as-draft and live status visible to the applicant at any point. Eight form steps were consolidated into five guided ones, and applicants no longer need to contact the team to find out where they stand.
