Improving Disaster Response and Aid Delivery with ICTs

1 minute read

As some of you may know, we’ve had many exciting new developments over the last few months, some of which were covered in our first blog post here. SIMLab’s focus on helping organizations to use inclusive technologies to build systems and services that are accessible, responsive, and resilient means that we’re now tool agnostic, but many of our case study resources for a while will continue to draw on our work with the Frontline product set.

One of the things we’ve been working though is our Context Assessment methodology, and how we can best articulate why and how information and communication habits and needs are critical considerations in development projects. Our newest case study, which documents ActionAid’s experience using FrontlineSMS to improve disaster-affected communities in Kenya, illustrates how crucial information flows are. It builds off blog posts on the project here and here, and new insights about the project design and lessons learned from project documentation and ActionAid staff.

In the project, ActionAid International Kenya and infosaid piloted an SMS-based communication and food aid delivery system. ActionAid sees information and two-way communication with communities and aid beneficiaries as essential parts of their work, and infoasaid (a DFID-funded initiative which ran from 2010-2013) was set up to support agencies to transform their approach to communicating with communities.

This pilot took place in Isiolo, Kenya, where chronic drought, food insecurity, and violent clashes threaten to push people into crisis. Prior to the SMS system, ActionAid relied on information relayed from Field Officers as their primary communication source with food-aid recipients. Compounded by security issues, lack of infrastructure, and time constraints, communication was becoming increasingly cumbersome, erratic and infrequent. Moreover, workers and food-aid recipients lacked information on market prices, scheduled food deliveries, and other updates. To read more about how they used FrontlineSMS to tackle some of these issues, and how staff began to pick up the system to do other parts of their work, click here.

Thank you to Paul Stewart for formatting this case study as a volunteer graphic designer. You can see his amazing work here.