Text messages used to deliver humanitarian aid

UNICEF innovators are using mobile phone technology to more effectively deliver humanitarian aid.

In Malawi, basic mobile phones are being used to improve the diagnosis and treatment of children with HIV. Laboratory results and treatment instructions are reaching healthcare workers via text in a much more rapid and efficient system than the previous use of couriers. Practitioners are also able to use text messaging to relay treatment outcomes to officials, enabling decision-makers to monitor data and keep track of progress.

In Liberia, text messaging became an important element of the effort to control and monitor Ebola. Aid workers sent text messages to a group of teenagers from Monrovia, asking them to sign up to Ebola text alerts. The teenagers replied, asking for ways to avoid contracting the disease. Through the exchange of such texts, it was possible for aid workers to track infected areas.

Text messaging services in Nigeria have enabled seven million births to be registered – a significant improvement from the situation three years ago where more than half the country’s six million annual births went unrregistered. Better monitoring enables increased access to healthcare and education.

The facilitation using basic but robust mobile phones is a practical innovation which stemmed from UNICEF’s Innovations Unit. This texting system is called RapidSMS, first developed in 2007, and it allows even the most basic model of mobile phone to communicate with the internet through a text message.

The unit works in collaboration with academia and private sector to come up with technical innovations to make humanitarian work much more effective.

Clarifying that the Innovations Unit is not an “Ideas Factory”, the founders Chris Fabian and Erica Kochi explained that they created the Unit when they discovered “how technology and advances in the private sector could be applied to an aid organisations such as UNICEF”.