Move away from the spreadsheet

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Having spent the last few months in Haiti trying to get our collective heads around the success of the Telefon Kwa Wouj IVR system - and the vast amounts of data it is producing – it was something of a relief to take a step back and visit London last month.

The trip inadvertently ended up being something of a busman’s holiday; as well as getting to see family and friends, my stay in the UK coincided with a couple of HIF events which I was invited to talk at.

Enthusiasm to attend and spread the word about our Haiti project was tempered slightly by the need to put a presentation together and delve back into the work that I was supposed to be having a bit of a break from.

But this was clearly an opportunity I couldn’t pass up, and I reluctantly opened my laptop to start trying to piece together some kind of narrative which, in 20 minutes, would explain where the project is and how we got there.

Little did I suspect that putting together the presentation and attending the HIF events would be far more useful for me than it could possibly have been for any of the people who sat through my sprawling Powerpoint.

Back in Haiti, having got over the initial success of the telephone line (we’re still averaging around 2,000 calls a day) the problems of dealing with the avalanche of data this represented became a really pressing issue.

So much so that, somewhere along the way, the achievements of the programme and the ongoing popularity of the Telefon Kwa Wouj line, became almost secondary distractions to the challenge of “how are we going to make sense of all these numbers?”

Putting together the presentation was a brilliant exercise for looking again at where the Beneficiary Communications programme in Haiti has come from, what we have achieved so far, and the vast array of opportunities emerging as the programme evolves, without the need for these positives to be overshadowed by the challenges we are working to overcome.

Meeting other people involved in innovative projects around the world, such as Ivanoe Fugali who is working on an accountability project using mobile phones in Somalia with the Danish Refugee Council, was truly inspiring – we’re all trying things for the first time and alongside the impressive successes, there are bound to be glitches, but this is all part of the process.

As long as we are learning from the challenges we encounter, and the inevitable mistakes that we make, we should not let these comparatively small bumps along the road distract us too much from the progress we’ve made as a whole.

In Haiti, over just a few months almost 100,000 callers have accessed Telefon Kwa Wouj to listen to sexual health information – in a country with one of the highest HIV rates in the Caribbean that is a serious achievement.

More than 80,000 callers have listened to information about how to prevent and treat cholera, and almost 60,000 have accessed information about disaster preparedness.

People are proactively choosing to call our system and deciding for themselves what they want to know more about. That we are playing a part in enabling that to happen is hugely rewarding.

When I got back to Haiti, Kerbie who manages Telefon Kwa Wouj had begun designing a new survey in the form of a quiz asking people about HIV.

Framing the survey in this way not only makes using the system a bit more fun, hopefully encouraging more people to call, but also gives it a double purpose: as well as finding out what people do and don’t know about HIV (information we can pass on to the Red Cross health team), we also get the opportunity to help address those information gaps and reinforce people’s existing knowledge by providing details of the right answers after each response. Simple.

There is still huge potential to evolve and develop the system, and after seven months it still feels sometimes that we are still only exploring the foothills of the opportunities it presents, but we are making progress, we are trying new things and, as well as providing information to people in Haiti, we’re also hopefully creating a road map of what (and what not) to do for anybody setting up a humanitarian phone line in the future.

So, as I discovered from own HIF presentation, it turns out we’re still doing a pretty good job. And, sitting in an office staring at spreadsheets and quibbling over the minutiae of data sets all day is an absolutely fantastic way to loose your sense of perspective. Who knew?

Mark South, Beneficiary Communications Delegate, Haiti