Last year, I spent some time in Benin piloting an SMS reporting system to track and respond to Violence against Children (VAC). After almost a year developing the idea and thinking it through to see if it was potentially feasible (see 7 or more questions to ask before adding ICTs), in February 2010 we conducted 2 workshops with youth, staff and local authorities in Couffo and Atacora, Benin, to design a system with their input (see Finding Some ICT answers in Benin). The main pieces of the reporting system are FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi. A few months after, staff reported back on some of the challenges with implementation (see Tweaking: SMS Violence Reporting System in Benin).
Last week, Romeo shared what we still need to find solutions for. Some of these are issues that we’d identified last year and others are additional things that Romeo has suggested as he’s gotten down to business.
Some people still call instead of texting, or they send “call me back” texts
- The team is fairly certain this is due to illiteracy. Plan will involve more school-going youth in the initiative because they have higher literacy levels and can support others with reporting if needed.
- Romeo and the team will continue doing outreach and education on how the system works both at community meetings and via radio broadcasts in French and local languages.
- To address the calls that may continue to come in, a voice mail will be set up on the phone that links up to the FrontlineSMS laptop, with a message explaining that people have to send in a text. Romeo will do some research to determine which languages to use in the message for the best result (French and the 2 main local languages….).
- If that doesn’t resolve the issue, Romeo and the staff will call back anyone who phones in.
- Cost of an SMS continues to be a discouraging factor for people in terms of reporting. Often when Romeo or other staff visit a community, community members take advantage of their physical presence to report additional cases of violence. This is not necessarily negative, considering that we want to increase the number of incidents reported and followed up on; however, if it turns out that awareness around violence is high but the cost of the SMS is a deterring factor in reporting, more inexpensive channels to report also need to be offered. We are still negotiating with the local operators to get a free SMS line.
Spam
- Some 50 spams a day are coming in. This is an issue on all mobile phones in Benin. Much of the spam comes from the mobile service providers themselves.
- If the spam is coming from the same number, it’s possible that a workaround script could be written up at the point where FrontlineSMS forwards to Ushahidi. The messages can also be marked on Ushahidi as spam, but they will still be arriving via FrontlineSMS, unfortunately, unless numbers can be blocked somehow.
- Needs further thought on how it might be overcome.
The Violence Tracking Platform (Ushahidi):
- We need to be 100% sure that any personal or identifying information coming in via the SMS reports is scrubbed so we do not put any children or witnesses at risk or falsely accuse anyone of violence against children by publishing the reports to the Ushahidi platform.
- Romeo will develop a Privacy and Protection Checklist and train those administering the Ushahidi system to be sure to remove identifying information thoroughly before allowing it to be published on the Ushahidi site.
- The identifying information still needs to be stored somewhere on the system to support with follow-up on the cases that come in. We may need additional development work on the platform to allow for that.
- We hope to integrate the Ushahidi map into the Violence against Children website, which has educational material, videos and cartoons done by youth, and a discussion forum. However if the information poses a risk to anyone, we may decide to make the Ushahidi site private and keep it as a management tool rather than a public site.
Categorizing:
- The staff who administer the Ushahidi website are not always clear which type of violence an incident should be categorized as (physical violence? sexual violence? psychological violence?).
- Romeo will create short guidelines to help people to categorize the incidents properly. He’d like these to be incorporated into the Ushahidi platform.
- Often a reported incident can fit into more than one category – eg., both physical and sexual violence. If it’s categorized in two categories, then we lose the sense of how many incidents there have been overall, and we’re unable to properly chart the data. We need to find a way to manage this on the system so that we have proper statistics.
Follow up on reported cases:
- We still want a way to track response and follow-up on cases within the Ushahidi platform, as often a report requires more than one verification visit.
- We need someplace within the platform to store this type of information to keep records of follow-up.
- This will require work by a developer, but it might be helpful for other institutions using Ushahidi as well. It’s also possible that FrontlineSMS Medic could be used for case management rather than Ushahidi, but it might prove confusing for staff to have to store and act on the same kind of information using two different tools.
Names of villages, hamlets, etc:
- We would like to have a listing on the map of the various hamlets, villages, etc. They do not currently appear on the map since there is no record of them on Open Street Maps or Google Maps. Plan has this detailed information in its internal systems and we want to add it to the base maps so that it’s easier for administrators to locate the incident in the right community.
- In addition to the technical work on the system, Romeo will continue to coordinate and share information with local partners and other organizations working on violence against children. There are similar initiatives already in place and we don’t want to duplicate efforts. Combining and sharing help line numbers and taking reports by both phone and SMS is one option.
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Having set up a hotline and realising the challenges of making it accessible to those who need it the most in a safe manner, this approach sounds like one good solution. Its super exciting, especially thinking about how you can get phones into the hands/places of those who need them once the mapping starts to show results. What I imagine is valuable is the community presence that our child-centred organisation has, because the most important thing is for people to recognise abuse in the first place, and then get them using the service.
The illiteracy issue is really interesting, and I agree that it isn’t a negative because people are trying to use the service (and I would imagine that it shows that SMS isn’t supposed to be the only form of communication and certainly in some extreme cases I imagine it couldn’t be).
Looking forward to seeing how this continues to develop. And love the organisation branded curtains that they have in Benin.
Thanks for the comment Max and I’d really welcome any further input from your experiences. I was just reading up more on Kenya’s Child Help Line which is really far along. Agreed that the community presence and broader awareness/discussion about violence is a major piece of the project.
Yeah I liked the curtains too – I suppose that’s in case you forget where you are working? 🙂 Have you seen the branded indigo batik cloth in some offices? You can get an entire skirt or dress with the logo all over it… like a branded t-shirt, only better…. if you’re into wearing your organization’s brand, that is.
I think I would wear branded bow-tie, like Romeo’s.
There is a very similar project, using the same platform, called Harassmap in Egypt to document and help counter sexual harassment.
Their website: http://harassmap.org/?l=en_US
A profile and interview: http://thinkafricapress.com/article/harassmap
Thanks for sharing, very interesting. I’m trying to understand the added value of using SMS technolgy to report violence if we already have a toll free hotline number for such a purpose.. ?
Hi Laura, originally we wanted to map and track incidents better and use the map to advocate for better prevention and response from the government. When we shared the idea, the child protection services thought it would be a useful way for them to get information so that they could follow up on the reports. I’m not sure how well the hotline is working – something we are looking into. We also wanted to see if SMS might offer an additional channel for reporting that could be cheaper and more private than calling. We’re still seeing if it’s of added value or not….
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