How would an organization address a health emergency in a rural setting in the developing world? Part of the solution involves working with the only communications channel universally used and accepted by communities at the BOP (“Base Of the Economic Pyramid”): mobile phones and the humble SMS. The following is a fictional account of how an organization might tackle this problem…
Jenny, a regional health program officer for a global NGO has a serious problem. She has just been notified that an outbreak of polio has been discovered across several states in her area, representing many millions of people. She directly runs programs with over 150,000 people in this region.
Her organization is mounting a swift and comprehensive response to minimize the impact of the outbreak through effective communication and a range of direct healthcare interventions, such as free Polio vaccinations at local clinics. There has been hesitancy in the past to take the polio vaccine for a range of reasons ranging from superstition, to religious beliefs, to sheer lack of awareness of the free clinics and their days of operation.
It is clear that communications must be a central component of all activities to encourage awareness, education and participation towards their goal. For this campaign, Jenni will be using Resdida’s Mobilize SMS management platform to reach out directly to communities, coordinate with staff, and manage logistic data and provide real time reporting on the crisis response.
The organization has names and cellphone phone numbers of around 60,000 people across the region, but it is scattered in a number of Microsoft Excel files. Jenni quickly combines the lists and uploads all 60,000 people to Mobilize in less than five minutes.
Once the recipients are uploaded, she manually writes a number of SMS-length stories she wishes to communicate around the outbreak of Polio, as well as information on vaccination clinics traveling to their area over the coming month. The organization and local government health department are very interested in feedback directly from the community, so Jenni utilizes the “Questions” area of Mobilize to include a couple of “polls” to these communities via SMS.
Once she has put together her stories, she schedules when each message needs to go out to correlate with other “on the ground” activities. The first message is a warning “blast” that there is a Polio outbreak, and that more information will come soon via SMS to the recipient’s phone.
She sends this out right from her desktop, and within an hour, all 60,000 people have received the information and some are even responding to her first question asking “Are all of your children vaccinated?”
Jenni used the same process to establish a communications “Channel” with her staff in the field, which guarantees her low-cost, real time communications with her staff, no matter where they are.
Using mobile and internet platforms to effectively create engagement with communities and over time, real change can be a significant challenge. If you’d like to know more about how RESON approaches these problems in partnership with organizations working on critical problems facing poor communities, get in touch with us here. For more information on the Mobilize platform, see the Resdida.com site here.
