Complaints and Response Mechanism – Voice and Accountability in Sindh
Posted on | May 7, 2012 | By peplorguk | 1 Comment
Over the next three months we’re going to be developing a voice-based Complaints and Response Mechanism (CRM) with Strengthening Participatory Organisation (SPO) to help them engage with the 32,000 beneficiaries of their
their CAFOD-funded ‘Enabling Resilience through Peacebuilding and Economic Development’ project in Kashmore District of Sindh Province. Our work will enable SPO to learn from their beneficiaries, quickly solve emerging problems, and create stron community buy-in.
This is part of our drive to use popular engagement and research-driven communications to strengthen feedback mechanisms between humanitarians and their beneficiaries. The Humanitarian Accountability Partnership is encouraging humanitarians to use CRMs, and we’re delighted to be working with SPO to design new ways of doing so in Pakistan.
Our last project with SPO was an SMS-based CRM model in Mirpur Khas District, also in Sindh province. FrontlineSMS were kind enough to post a short case study of their project on their blog, and Communicating with Disaster-Affected Communities (CDAC) included our case study in their resources page.
Now we’re expanding to look at voice calls: how beneficiaries of humanitarian projects can call into an automated Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to give feedback, and how the implementing organisation can manage and respond to that feedback effectively. And we’ve expanded from a few hundred households in the last project to some 32,000 beneficiaries in this one.
Although Alex worked wonders achieving a high level of engagement even with low-literacy phone users with the previous SMS project, doing so required in-person engagement to explain the system. That’s not going to be possible with thousands of beneficiaries, so using voice enables us to work at scale.
As the project progresses, we’re also going to explore providing a referrals system to connect beneficiaries with third party service providers, as well as an automated outward calls functionality to deliver pre-recorded announcements and questions to engaged beneficiaries. Lots of fun. We’ll keep you all updated on this as it develops.
The wizards at our sister company, Raabta Consultants, are busy developing the IVR system, writing code in Asterisk and developing up a bespoke admin panel for SPO, but the very first step of such a project is going to be the research. We need to know how the project beneficiaries use and share mobile phones. SPO are starting the field research for us now.
Adil, the Deputy Programme Manager at Raabta, with responsibility for Research and Information Systems, has developed a rather neat handwritten Urdu questionnaire, based on easy-to-follow flow charts. This learns from our mobile phone research in FATA, which you can access directly on our analysis portal. Let’s see how it goes!
Here’s a rough and ready scan of the questionnaire overview. Can’t wait to get our hands on the data coming back.
Tags: CRM > Mobile Phones > Pakistan > Population Engagement > Research > Voice Calls
Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities
Posted on | April 3, 2012 | By Alex | No Comments
Thanks to our friends at FrontlineSMS (and special thanks to Amy O’Donnell) PEPL’s recent work in Sindh is now featured on Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities’ (CDAC) Case Studies page. The team at FrontlineSMS were kind enough to choose our Complaints and Response Mechanism (CRM) intervention in Sindh as an example of how FrontlineSMS could be used to improve accountability and transparency during aid distribution following humanitarian disasters. Together we prepared a case study that FrontlineSMS took to CDAC’s Media and Technology Fair at the end of last month.
You can find the full write up here.
We’re absolutely delighted that our work with Pakistan-based NGO Strengthening Participatory Organisation (SPO) is reaching a wider audience. At the moment we are again working with SPO to develop an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system for increased two-way communications with disaster-affected communities. I hope to be able to provide you with more details soon!
Communications for Accountability
Posted on | February 23, 2012 | By Alex | No Comments
It has been a busy few months. You can probably tell from the fact that we haven’t posted here since November. One of the things that has kept us busy over last few months is a collaboration with Strengthening Participatory Organization (SPO), a national-level Pakistani NGO.
Amy O’Donnell, the Radio Project Manager over at FrontlineSMS, was kind enough to push us to write a blog post about the work that we have done and yesterday it appeared on their website.
You can take a look at the post here, and if people are interested I can post a longer version with a bit more detail here.
FATA Insight – Media and Perceptions Research
Posted on | November 23, 2011 | By Jim Linton Williams | 2 Comments
… and we’re back! Sorry one and all for the ominous silence. It’s been a busy, scurrying, productive few months. We at PEPL have bunkered down to concentrate on building up the capacity of our chosen primary implementing partner in Pakistan: Raabta Consultants. Raabta is a two-way communications company, focussed on providing research, media productions, telephony solutions and related capacity building to the social sector.
You can see more about their work on their brand spanking new website. They’re now producing four radio shows per week broadcasting on FM stations in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, alongside a monthly magazine, and are providing SMS communications and coordination support to four civil society organisations. More on all of this later – for now, have a look at their first research report.
Here’s the zip of the first issue of FATA Insight, Raabta Consultants’ monthly research report from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. This report was supported by both PEPL and its partner, InterMedia, and was designed to provide guidance to Raabta’s radio productions. Each of the radio shows focusses on providing ordinary people in FATA with solutions to the problems in their families and communities, with a focus on those problems that increase the prevalence of violence in society. So to help get that rolling, the research looks into the gaps between the problems people experience and the problems that they read about in papers or listen to on the radio. We found out last month, for example, that one in three of our female respondents rated drugs as the greatest ongoing problem in their communities, but that none of the radio material or newspaper articles that we analysed addressed the topic at all.
The research then goes a step further and asks people what organisations they know of that can help them solve these problems. The results that came back last month were stark: none of our respondents could name a specific organisation that could help them. We got one of three answers from everyone: ‘the government’, ‘any NGO’, ‘I don’t know’. So Raabta’s radio and magazine productions are now concentrating on helping their audiences find concrete sources of help in solving their problems.
The research also explores the settings in which people engage with media: whether they listen to radio alone or with friends and family; what sources of information they most trust for humanitarian and safety information; what kinds of discussions on the radio that they’d like to contribute to. We also hope to have a special report on mobile phone use, addressing many of the issues brought up on this blog and in our SMS Engagement Guide. No promises yet though!
Because the research was designed to input to radio though, we plumped for monthly small sample surveys, rather than say an annual large-sample survey. So this data can’t be used to make generalisations about FATA, ok? It’s also not the simplest thing in the world to conduct research in FATA, so we’re not talking about extremely rigorous random sampling – the military operations and militancy prevent access to many areas. That said, the data provides ethnographic insight into how people in FATA engage with media, and how that affects their thinking and behaviour. It’s certainly getting our comms-obsessed neurones firing, and it may do the same for yours too. Enjoy!
There’s much more to write, but that’ll have to do for now. Feel free to get in touch if you want to know more, or contact Raabta’s Chief Executive, Saeed Khan, at saeed@raabta.pk.
Tags: FATA > Mobile Phones > Pakistan > Population Engagement > Print > Radio
SMS Engagement in Pakistan – A Practical Guide
Posted on | June 14, 2011 | By Jim Linton Williams | No Comments
PEPL is today publishing its first practical guide to population engagement, focussing upon the use of two-way SMS communications in Pakistan.
Totalling nearly 50 pages, this comprehensive resource explores how ordinary people in Pakistan use SMS and mobile phones, and explains the tools available for using SMS at scale to engage with them. Intended for civil society, the humanitarian sector, and government, this guide will be useful for any organisation interested in using participatory methods to engage with its constituents or stakeholders in Pakistan.
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Mobile phones are approaching ubiquity in Pakistan. Allowing low cost access to community members across class, linguistic and geographical boundaries, the mobile phone can be an effective tool to communicate with ordinary people in Pakistan, as well as to learn from them, and even collaborate with them. This guide provides a research-driven and practical guide for using SMS to do so. It is intended for both Pakistani and international institutions, whether in government, civil society or the humanitarian sector. It represents the findings of its authors only, and, it is hoped, is the first draft of a collaborative document, to which many of its readers might contribute.
This document is intended to provide an understanding both of the range of technical options available for SMS-based communications, and of the ways in which campaigns should be conceived and executed in light of the scope and character of both SMS use and phone use in Pakistan.
It also makes the argument that SMS provides an opportunity to do more with mobile- based communications than simple announcements and polling, useful activities though they are. It argues that the conversational nature of SMS, in Pakistan and elsewhere, allows for sustained, two-way communications with ordinary people.
In structuring SMS communications so that they encourage a response from the population, and so that they establish through iteration a rolling exchange with the population, organisations working for social good will gain the opportunity to improve their communications as they go along: by building their understanding of the audience, by engaging in continual near real-time monitoring and evaluation, and by equipping themselves with a pool of locally-generated messages that can be studied, learned from and (considerately) re-used.
Furthermore, the act itself of engaging in two-way communications gives greater popular credibility and trust to the communicator; the act of seeking a response from an individual, and thus implicitly of valuing his or her opinion, is powerful in itself. The result is more trusted communications and thus more effective communications – and perhaps more effective and trusted institutions too.
Tags: Mobile Phones > Pakistan > PEPL > Publications > SMS
Two Ways are Better than One
Posted on | June 10, 2011 | By Jim Linton Williams | No Comments
Here’s setting the record straight: two-way communications are better than one-way communications. There, I’ve said it.
A communications campaign that encourages a response from their audience, and which engages with those responses, will do a better job than one that doesn’t. I believe that that statement holds whether the campaign seeks to raise awareness of important information, to engage with those who hold conflicting ideas or values, or (if I might be so bold) to learn from or collaborate with ordinary people.
There are four reasons why. Here they are:
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