In North Darfur, Sudan, white Land Rovers with loudspeakers attached to the front roll through towns and villages broadcasting messages about Covid-19. Theyurge people to see a healthcare provider if they have symptoms of the disease and adhere to the measures that can help them stay safe — social distancing and hand washing.
Because of the pandemic, Save the Children can’t send community health workers into this area, which lacks widespread internet and cell coverage, so it is using very basic technology to inform people how to protect themselves. The organization is used to working in countries where it isn’t always safe to meet face-to-face with the people it serves, places like Syria, Yemen, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Before Covid-19 started spreading globally, Save the Children had already accumulated lots of experience to help it effectively disseminate information.
“We’ve been using a lot of these tools anyway, but now we really have to ramp up how we’re using them and deploy them in many more countries than we were in the past,” says John Zoltner, senior adviser for development and innovation for Save the Children.
In countries where more people have internet-connected phones, like Bangladesh, Cambodia, and India, the group gets information out using the messaging service WhatsApp. With 2 billion users worldwide, WhatsApp has been an important platform for many groups working in developing nations. Elsewhere, Save the Children partners with mobile carriers and the government to send text messages to entire communities. It also sets up interactive voice-response phone systems that allow people to call a number and work their way through a phone tree to find out basic information about the virus and safety measures. Voice systems are particularly effective in places where many people are illiterate, Zoltner says.
“I’m a big believer in not always using the latest technology,” he says. “People make the mistake of taking software that works in the U.S., which is a very different, high-powered, high-bandwidth environment. They don’t realize it won’t work in Syria or in a refugee camp.”
Lessons Over the Radio
As the coronavirus spreads around the world, international aid groups and other nonprofits that work with remote and impoverished communities have brought their foreign staff home. With only local staff in the country and other employees working remotely from overseas, some services they normally provide are falling by the wayside. Instead, the groups are prioritizing educating people about the pandemic, social distancing, and maintaining proper hygiene as well as combating rumors and false information.
“Simple technologies are sometimes better than complex technologies,” says Jennifer Brass, associate professor at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public & Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, who specializes in international development. “Meeting people where they are is something that aid organizations try to do. If people don’t have electricity and they don’t have phones, then driving a car around with a loudspeaker makes sense.”
Here in the United States, high-tech solutions like Microsoft Teams and Zoom calls have become a staple of distance learning. But they’re not much help for students who don’t have computers or internet access. Save the Children turned to a low-tech alternative and created educational radio programs in 44 countries — mostly in Africa — that allow students call in and ask questions. The group works with experts in each country to determine which parts of the curriculum would translate well to radio since it is so different from learning in a classroom.
In Haiti and Iraq, Action Against Hunger is simply calling the people it serves to give them information about the coronavirus as well as sending text messages and voice messages. In refugee camps in Uganda, the group broadcasts call-in talk-radio shows that include staff members, community leaders, and local authorities. It has done one on Covid-19 and another on myths about the virus. The group also created talking points for a local nonprofit and radio stations to help them develop Covid-related programming. In Cambodia, where more people have smartphones, Action Against Hunger has created Facebook groups for its support groups for young mothers, and it shares information about the virus that way.
There are real benefits to using two-way forms of communication, says Ben Phillips, a humanitarian officer with Oxfam. For example, sending a message on WhatsApp is better than sending a broadcast text that recipients cannot respond to. WhatsApp lets people ask questions of the sender and others in the group. “Behaviors are complex things, and you can’t change behaviors just from a message,” he says. “Things like WhatsApp and, potentially, video calls are ways that you can still hear those questions.”
To facilitate that back and forth, the group has partnered with a local nonprofit to set up a call center in Somaliland, where it has been doing drought-response work for many years. It had to move staff out of communities there so the local group is now running the call center with staff from the Ministry of Health to provide information about Covid-19. It has already received more than a million calls.
In Kenya, Oxfam partnered with a popular music group, the Mukuru All Stars, to create a song and a video on YouTube to raise awareness about the pandemic. The group is also working with young people to paint murals around Nairobi with messages about how to prevent coronavirus infections.
While organizations might be tempted to focus on the technology they want to use, it is far more important to identify what they’re trying to achieve, says Zoltner, who has spent his career helping groups deliver their programs through different technologies in some of the least connected communities on the planet. After identifying the need, organizations should examine the research on what is effective. Only then does it make sense to select the technology.
“It’s about taking the message to the right platform, using the right channel,” Zoltner says. “Sometimes that is new technology. Sometimes that’s old technology.”
Trust Is Key
Under normal circumstances, speaking with people face-to-face about disease outbreaks and other issues is critical, says Oxfam’s Phillips. While aid workers can’t do that now, the in-person relationships they forged in the past have built trust — something that has been key to making remote messages effective. The group, he says, is most successful in the communities where it has the strongest ties.
“In a lot of places we work, we’ve been supporting people with livelihood projects or humanitarian assistance for decades,” says Phillips. “We have that trust.”
The aid group CARE is pushing out robocalls to people it has worked with in the past and is working with telecommunication companies to create hotlines people can call to get basic information about the virus and safety measures. It’s also using text messages and WhatsApp — taking many approaches to reach people the way they are comfortable communicating.
“It’s robocalling, but it’s a targeted list of people who know the organization,” says Christian Pennotti, global director of savings groups at CARE. “Even though we can’t go there physically to meet people, they trust us. If we can get them information, they’re going to feel confident that that’s accurate.”
The hard work of developing trust over time — whether it is with an individual staff member or an organization’s brand — pays off in a crisis, says Dan Honig, assistant professor of international development at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Trust is an important component of resilience,” he says. “If we have a trusting relationship, then that relationship is able to adapt to whatever life throws our way.”
That works well for communities where groups have already built trust. But it’s unclear how groups can build trust in places where they lack a track record and cannot show up in person. “How we build trust remotely is a really important question that I don’t think we have a lot of experience doing,” Honig says.
While technology — both low and high — has been an important tool in the immediate crisis, he worries about the long-term implications. Technology can connect, but it can also separate groups from that vital on-the-ground knowledge and trust that is critical to their work. It’s important to understand what could be lost over radio and text messages, WhatsApp, and loudspeakers.
“There are really a lot of ingenious stopgap measures happening,” Honig says. “But as it becomes increasingly likely that what was devised as a stopgap is going to be the new normal, we need to think about not just the quick-fix upside but also the potential long-term downsides.”
Formidable Challenges
While aid groups have made progress spreading the word about the coronavirus,, they still face plenty of challenges. In late May, Oxfam announced it was laying off 1,500 people and closing programs in 18 countries. Programs will be unwound slowly according to a spokeswoman, but the group’s radio messaging on Covid-19 will be cut in Pakistan.
News of layoffs at Oxfam, one the oldest and largest international aid groups, is both shocking and scary, says Brass, at Indiana University. “International groups have never faced this sort of challenge before. What’s different about it this time is because it’s a pandemic, everyone in the entire world is facing this,” says Brass. “It’s a really different set of challenges. A lot of that has to do with funding more than anything.”
Oxfam is also facing challenges responding to emergencies in the countries where it will remain. The humanitarian support personnel it deploys to hot spots in the event of a crisis are grounded. Even if there are huge outbreaks in a certain country, they will not be able to travel there.
These individuals are providing support remotely, but it is not as effective. “In Syria, you go into locations where people are displaced. You can actually understand the context, understand the need, and then respond appropriately and as effectively as possible,” Phillips says. “Now you’re trying to support Syria from Spain.”
Groups are also having trouble reaching some of the people who are in the greatest danger in the crisis, says Mary Kay Gugerty, a professor of nonprofit management at the University of Washington, who specializes in rural development in sub-Saharan Africa. Many Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh are in lockdown, for example, and it is hard to get messages in the right language to people there. “Refugee or displaced populations are super vulnerable,” says Gugerty. “It’s doubly challenging for NGOs to physically access the camps.”
Changing Balance of Power
The pandemic has also shined a harsh light on how international aid groups treat Western staff members who are working in developing countries differently than local employees and the people they serve, says Honig, of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. When the going gets tough — like during a global pandemic or some armed conflicts — organizations pull expats out of the country, leaving behind the local staff and those they serve.
“There has long been a pretty explicit two-tier system in many international NGOs,” he says.
When groups do leave a community, they lose the deep first-hand knowledge of the situation there, sometimes gained over decades of experience. That’s hard to maintain over WhatsApp. “As we move to more tech-enabled solutions to understand how to deliver projects and understand programs, I think there’s a lot of creativity to celebrate,” Honig says. “But there’s also a kind of background risk to be cognizant of — which is what we stop knowing.”
But there are also benefits. Honig points out that when foreign staff leave an area, they often turn to the people they serve to continue the organization’s work. “When we can’t go in there anymore, it begs the question, ‘Who’s already there, and what would it look like to empower them?’ ” he says.
Action Against Hunger is doing just that with some projects. Instead of doing large-scale screening for malnutrition in children or sending workers into communities to do assessments, the group is giving women in the community the tools to screen for the problem themselves. The group is distributing something called a MUAC — which stands for mid-upper arm circumference — a sort of tape measure that when wrapped around a child’s upper arm can indicate malnutrition. Now women in more and more places are doing the screening themselves.
In Indonesia, Nature Conservancy staff who would traditionally accompany fishermen to monitor the health of the fisheries have left because of the pandemic. Covid-19 has also disrupted the market for fish because supply chains have been altered so the fishermen are making little money from their catch. The group is attempting to solve both of those problems with one solution: It is now paying the fishermen to monitor the fisheries themselves. They are then transmitting that data back to the group via WhatsApp or text message. “They’re able to get some income from monitoring the fishery without us breaking the social-distancing restrictions,” says David Banks, the group’s interim chief conservation officer.
Turning work over to local staff or residents can pose challenges with donors who may not trust them or who question the quality of their work, says Brass, but in the long run, giving over more authority to local people only improves outcomes. “I would hope that ceding more authority to local people would continue to happen.”
Deep Connections
Somaliland and Bangladesh may seem worlds away from the United States and concerns here about public health, the economy, and the disproportionate impact of the virus on communities of color. But experts say some of the lessons aid groups have learned can be applied here at home — especially for nonprofits that serve U.S. communities that lack access to the internet or the devices necessary to stay connected to schools and health information.
The most important thing international aid groups have learned is the value of being deeply connected to the communities in which they work. That is a relatively recent shift, says the University of Washington’s Gugerty. A decade ago, many aid groups would have had Americans or Europeans staffing its country offices, but now they are more likely to have a staff made up of local residents. And that has made a difference.
“Because they’ve got staff on the ground who live and work there, they’re better able to assess the context than in some other emergencies where you’re sort of flying in and trying to figure things out,” she says. “That is a real advantage.”
Aid groups have benefited from decades of critiques, Gugerty says, and have been working to better develop their understanding of the people they serve. “The practice that you should be community-centric and listen to the communities you work in, even if imperfectly implemented, has been something that these organizations have been wrestling with for a long time,” she says. “I think it’s hard to pivot if you don’t already have those norms and the practices in place.”
