2017 ICT4D Conference

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is a technology that many development organizations turn to as an avenue for interaction with community members. The technology has potential to simplify and standardize the process of information sharing with community members and partners, enables the collection of mass data at a minimal cost, as well as enabling community members to express themselves and provide valuable input to development practitioners. At Equal Access Nigeria, we use IVR for dissemination of information geared towards Countering Violent Extremism, and also to gather audience feedback for Arewa24, our 24Hour Hausa language television station. While we have a large following on social media (Facebook, Twitter and Youtube primarily), IVR has allowed us to reach out to, and give a voice to a large portion of our offline audience who do not have access to the internet.

Despite these many benefits, we have encountered two concrete challenges in our use of IVR. The first challenge is unusable feedback (responses that are hang-ups or have poor sound quality). Through operational research, we learned that the first challenge is related to a second challenge, which is community members’ lack of user familiarity with voicemail, and lack of comprehension about the type of responses they can/should give. In this presentation, we will discuss practical plans of overcoming the challenges we’ve experienced with IVR, and we will aim to generate dialogue with conference participants and to crowd-source additional suggestions and experiences from peers.