Category: COVID-19 response

March 25th, 2020 — The Hindi audio content we have developed can be accessed here, based on a FAQ collated by us from various GoI/WHO sources (some open questions remain for which we will be happy to get inputs). If you can translate this content into other languages then do let us know.

We will next prepare content to counter significant fear in the communities, and the stigma that is getting attached to migrants who are returning from work and with anybody sick in the neighbourhood.

We also want to prepare FAQs and advisory for FLWs — it is blank right now and we will appreciate help to put it together, a few resources are here.

Further, keep a tab on this sheet where we are constantly adding more content on news and localized announcements for districts where we are working, to prevent misinformation, and also collating voices from the community. Bear with us as we get more organized on this. Write to us at covid-response@gramvaani.org if you want to use any of this material to write blogs or articles for the mainstream media, about ground realities in rural areas.

Our services as outlined below are now live, we are expanding district by district to learn as we go along and course correct, to avoid any harm or confusion.

March 23rd, 2020 — We have set up a district-wise response network in partnership with several organizations. Read note here. Our goal is to provide authentic information and advisory to rural and low-income communities, and to strengthen the capacity of the health system to refer, track, and counsel probable cases of COVID-19. Three services are being launched:

• Access to FAQs, news, entertaining and engaging content, quizzes, etc for communities to deal with COVID-19
• Self-assessment survey especially on behalf of the elderly and very young children, to provide crisp actionable feedback
• Referral service to guide people to the right facilities, track their progress over time, and counsel them on appropriate action

So far we have organizations like Healing Fields Foundation, iKure, CRY, Digital Green, and the Piramal Foundation to provide referral advice and tracking support in several districts of Bihar, Jharkhand, UP, Orissa, Telangana, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu. We are looking to add more partners, please write to covid-response@gramvaani.org if you have a connect with FLWs. Additionally, we will run information and advisory on all of the Mobile Vaani platforms (across 20+ districts in Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, UP, Delhi NCR, and Tamil Nadu), as well as several partner-led platforms including with Digital Green, Enable India, and CREA, and link the various services from these platforms as well.

For prospective partners, if you need to learn more about the services and the process, see the tutorial slides here. In case you can assist with moderation of the voice-recordings, also see the quick-moderation guide here.

March 21st, 2020 — At Gram Vaani, our priorities have suddenly shifted to combating the global Novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Along with ensuring the safety of our staff and volunteer teams, we are striving to leverage our technology platforms and capabilities to support rural and low-income communities in this crucial time. Public health researchers from the University of Montreal and computer science students and faculty from IIT Delhi are working alongside us in this effort. Download a concept note here, and read below for the latest updates.

Awareness building: The right information delivered through the right platforms will inform and empower communities to stay safe and healthy during the crisis. This includes those in hard-to-reach segments (low literacy, rural and without Internet) and those who are at greater risk of suffering from the disease’s double burden of ill health and poverty, particularly women in their roles as family caregivers and frontline workers such as CHWs, ASHAs and AWWs. Our team is developing suitably contextualized audio content using authentic sources from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, India and the World Health Organization. This content can be used by all of our partners, and we will also be playing it on our wide networks in rural Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and low-income communities in Delhi NCR. This includes:

• Summary advice on symptoms, prevention measures, care, and other useful information including links to the Government of India helpline phone numbers.

• Tutorials to help health workers in healthcare facilities keep abreast with new training protocols or guidelines for infection prevention and control or contact tracing.

We have prepared this FAQ from various resources. Following are some additional important open questions about contextualizing the advisories for rural and low-income populations. Please do take a look in case you have any clarity, or share with others who can experiment and propose appropriate solutions.

Countering misinformation: Authentic information about the COVID-19 status in the country and the world, including the government strategy, is going to be imperative to counter any misinformation that could surface on other media platforms especially if the going gets tough.

Community feedback: Our mission always has been to reverse the flow of information, and make it bottom-up instead of top-down. We are keeping alert to listening to problems that our users are facing, not just on health but also on the economic front, and we are channeling these to the regional and national media outlets.

This is being combined with a few technological solutions we are readying as an emergency preparedness step.

Outbound messaging system for frontline staff: With frontline cadre distributed across vast geographies and with dynamically evolving disease prevention and control procedures, it is essential to keep them updated on the latest protocols to follow. The automated system can send correct information to the functionaries in a real-time manner. We are preparing an FAQ for frontline health workers.

Case-reporting system for frontline staff: The system enables frontline staff to report information about probable cases, their age, gender, number of family members, travel history, etc. This information can be collated and sent to state case-tracking systems. When coupled with data about verified cases, this can become an important indicator to predict future outbreak clusters. This will also help expand the capacity of the state helplines, many of which are run manually right now. We are also in conversation with the District Health Information System (DHIS2) team from the University of Oslo to potentially integrate our case-reporting system to their dashboard and case-tracking system.

This is a draft IVR structure for an integrated case-reporting and FAQ system.

Smartform based collection of phone numbers from community members to get prepared for mass messaging: Frontline staff are not adept at using digital systems to provide information, and mass-training on how to use these tools is not feasible in the current circumstances either. We have therefore developed specially formatted paper forms which can be digitized rapidly through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools. We are rapidly working to improve its accuracy. Phone numbers thus collected can be linked to specific locations and with care-of health workers and other frontline staff, so that response in case of follow-ups can be quick as well.

Query resolution and self-assessment system: We are building an automated voice-based question-answering system wherein people can call to seek information and ask questions, in as seamless a way as possible. The system will provide automated responses to the queries, or if their queries are not resolved then we will try to connect them with a network of informed volunteers who can match callers with pre-recorded and standardized audio capsules. A self-assessment system can also be setup to guide people on next steps of whether they might be in need for testing and should contact the government helplines or testing centers.  We will try to also enable this in a text-format on the Facebook messenger and Whatsapp channels.

This is a draft IVR structure to host FAQs and a self-assessment survey.

Outbound messaging to community members will provide correct awareness messaging in a localized manner. In view of social distancing advisory by governments to combat the disease, entertaining ways of awareness building like quizzes can help alleviate anxiety and panic related to the disease. Self-evaluation of the disease at the community level can also be designed based on technically approved guidelines.

Gram Vaani’s Community media platform, Mobile Vaani, with its wide network helps reach out to underserved populations (rural, low literate) and provides an option to not only access information but also contribute towards reporting the ground situation. This community reporting will be instrumental to inform the world about health and economic challenges that the community is facing. We especially request our partners to contact us for any further assistance that we can provide.

Should you wish to reach out to us for any information or access to the voice content for using on your platforms, please contact us at covid-response@gramvaani.org or Twitter or Facebook.

Apr 29th, 2020 — A summary deck about our Covid related work so far. 250 impact stories since March 24th, 350K+ calls, 7K+ user stories, 2 surveys concluded to understand ground realities, 2 more surveys underway, several articles and reports written, 150+ content capsules created by our team and translated into multiple languages.

Apr 3rd, 2020 — We have started state-wise COVID-19 dedicated IVRs in four states now. These are missed-call based IVRs. Users can listen to pre-recorded FAQs and other content that we are producing on a regular basis, take a self-assessment survey to check if they may have at-risk symptoms and would like to consult a health worker, and report any issue they might be facing such as problems with food, cash, medical emergencies, etc. A wide network of partners have come together to provide these response services, including the Healing Fields Foundation, Piramal Foundation, and Tika Vaani in North India, and READ, REACH, TRLM, and Vizhuthugal in Tamil Nadu.

• Bihar: 9211153222
• Jharkhand: 9266609111
• Uttar Pradesh: 9266672555
• Tamil Nadu: 9266618777

Along with this, we are also actively running the content on our Mobile Vaani clubs, where our volunteers have completely floored the pedal to bring impact by responding to lockdown and other problems that the communities are facing. From providing help with securing food, cash, utilities, and escalating the need to strengthen government guidelines, our volunteers and community teams show that media is not just about providing information but also about translating that into action. Continue reading below to also understand the ground realities and other efforts we are undertaking to encourage communities to be more positive in their outlook about the virus and about community and family life in general.

May 14th, 2020 – We have also actively participated in several campaigns for more state responsiveness, including with the National Campaign for Migrant Workers for safe travel of stranded migrants, with SWAN for a review and standardization of procedures for travel of migrant workers, and several letters we have written ourselves drawing the attention of district commissioners and secretaries on problems being faced by the communities.

May 3rd, 2020 – A dashboard is also live giving a status of our calls and geographies from where users are calling and reporting problems. We are eager to have new partners join the network to use our technology in their own respective communities. We have prepared short tutorial videos and decks to explain our processes:

• Community mobilization: Deck (English, Hindi). Video (English, Hindi).
• Content contributions: Deck (English, Hindi). Video (English, Hindi).
• Impact pathways: Deck (English, Hindi). Video (English, Hindi).

May 23rd, 2020

Dear friends of Gram Vaani,

We hope this note finds you, your teams and families safe and well.

This week marks about two months since we initiated a COVID-19 response with a large network of partners. As an organization born a decade ago to ensure a bottom up flow of information from the hardest-to-reach communities (rural, not on digital media, migrant workers in cities) using simple voice-based technologies, we feel vindicated in our resolve for the need to work with these communities. We were able to, in a timely manner, leverage our established systems and partners’ capabilities to strongly support the communities during this ongoing emergency. Alongside however is our growing impatience that much still needs to be done and could have been done better for bridging the gaps in the social and health fabric of the communities we collectively serve.

This note is to share a summary of what we are learning and a call for collaboration as we tread the emergency ahead. Please click on the hyperlinks to read our thoughts in more detail.

The need for empathy to listen and respond quickly

As the lockdown set in and our platforms started getting flooded with cries for help by our users for food and cash, in both rural as well as in urban areas where migrant workers were stranded, we quickly responded by facilitating linkages via our volunteers with ground partners and the government administration to provide relief. Alongside the online and offline effort, we wrote fervently – we ran rapid surveys about the reach of relief measures in rural areas, in urban areas for industrial workers, problems faced by migrant workers in cities and resident workers in villages, we wrote in the media (here, here, and here), our partner 101 Reporters helped amplify many of these surveys in the media as well, we wrote many letters to the administration on the urgent need to strengthen the relief delivery systems, and we joined hands with the National Campaign for Migrant Workers for safe travel of stranded migrants and with SWAN for review and standardization of procedures for the travel of migrant workers.

Some administrations reacted quickly too, and in many states we are continuing to provide communication services to several government departments, but this episode also made us realize that the gaps we saw in the delivery of relief measures came up because these gaps had always existed in the system. This includes the exclusion of many families from ration card lists, problems with Jan Dhan linkages, biometric authentication failures, deficient banking infrastructure, etc.

This made us question why these gaps had not been addressed so far, even though they have been known since a long time, and points to the need for more empathy by the state to listen to hardships and to respond quickly to them. Several ad hoc and temporary systems have been put into place to address these gaps during the pandemic, but they need systemic fixing. We are launching a campaign from next week titled #NotStatusQuo, to specifically push for suggestions on how some of these temporary systems can be institutionalized to strengthen the foundations for the delivery of welfare services and social security to the people.

The relevance of partnerships and civil society as human assets on the ground

Throughout these last two months, we have been humbled by the tremendous response mobilized by many of our partners and our own volunteers. Right from providing the key technical knowledge by the University of Montreal and the Tika Vaani team to create content regarding health and lifestyle practices for our users, to the delivery of food kits for stranded workers in Gurgaon by GNEM, and cash by IYRC, to our partners Jeevan Trust, Saranalayam, Vizhuthugal, TLRF,  providing similar relief in Tamil Nadu, Aajeevika Bureau in Gujarat, and health and other support by the Healing Fields Foundation and Piramal Foundation in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Jharkhand, along with our own volunteers and field teams in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Madhya Pradesh, who have relentlessly followed-up on issues raised by the users, it has convinced us of the relevance of partnerships and civil society as crucial assets that need to be nurtured and sustained. They were able to mobilize all this impact because they were there when this was needed, and they were able to strongly support the government systems in a decentralized manner. A quick funding support from Omidyar Networks helped us considerably to sustain the higher call volumes on our platforms.

The model is now being replicated and amplified by an ever increasing network of partners with a focus on specific topics, like child safety with ILFAT and CRY; student wellbeing with NalandaWay; CREA and FPAI on family planning; Plan India, NBJK, IDF, and CINI on social protection, and new geographies with the Swasti COVID Action Collab, Ambuja Cement Foundation, and others.

This of course raises open questions about the challenges in sustaining civil society networks, but it also reinforces the strong sense of volunteerism and solidarity that is a part of our society. It is deeply painful to see attempts to rupture this social fabric every now and then, but we remain optimistic about the strong sense of justice and fraternity that pervades our communities. We remain committed to having Mobile Vaani as an open platform for discussion and debate across divides, as a means for different opinions to understand one another and find common grounds.

The need to have an ear to the ground when designing technology

Before the lockdown and the need for a humanitarian relief response, we were thinking of the COVID-19 crisis as mostly a health-related issue and our partner network was probably the first to launch a COVID-19 self-assessment test on our IVRs. However, just one day into the launch, we started receiving feedback from our volunteer teams that the survey was creating anxiety among our users because of the fear and communal stigma which had already set-in in the communities. We immediately rolled back the survey and tried seven different stances before we finally launched it as an explicit intermediary counseling and guidance support layer, to be provided via our partners like the Healing Fields Foundation, in a completely discrete manner. Several impact stories followed where people got reassurance and guidance on appropriate steps they should take, through the human connectenabled via the service. Many self-assessment tests have since then come up, including even on the Arogya Setu app, but we are deeply skeptical that unless a message of support and care is not established by these platforms, they will remain underutilized in their impact. We have written a bit about this in our article titled Technologies of Disempowerment.

Emerging issues

We remain alert to new issues that are likely to arise as the lockdown eases.

With a heavy push towards financial digitalization, but for a population which did not even have bank accounts until recently, we have come across many issues of fraud. Phishing scams done via Facebook networks, and allegations of service fraud by banking kiosks and correspondents which have been brought up by our users, indicate the need for a re-think on the technology design and associated processes for financial inclusion. Similarly, extensive exclusion problems in welfare schemes due to Aadhaar related linkage errors, point towards a reorientation to an emphasis on reducing exclusion errors than inclusion errors.

The lack of documentation of workers emerged as a significant roadblock to disbursing instant cash relief to stranded migrants, as has been documented in extensive surveys by Jan Sahas and ourselves. The reliance on employer or contractor initiated worker documentation has not worked, across social security schemes like PF, ESI, BOCW, and other welfare boards. A re-think is needed on systematic worker-initiated methods to guarantee social security and move towards formalization of worker rights, even before we consider formalization of the economy.

Providing income opportunities to the surplus labour now in rural areas remains an open question. MNREGA work has started in many places but it is well known that it alone will not be sufficient to provide employment to the surplus labour now back in the villages, and neither will it be sufficient as the only means of income. The agricultural economy will also take time to recover, with significantly disrupted supply chain linkages. We do not know how the economy will emerge from this crisis, but we remain committed to evolving new methods and use-cases to support our communities in dealing with grave impending economic problems. Widespread discrimination against the returned migrant workers make the situation even more complex.

Both COVID-19 related as well as regular health services delivery have been challenged with the enormity of the scale of the emergency. We are helping connect our users with partners including ARMMAN, Karma Health, and Lets Talk who are providing tele-counselling services on ANC/PNC advice, general ailments, and mental health, respectively, along with also directing our users to relevant government services. As the public health services begin to resume, we are remaining alert to any emerging needs where the communities may need guidance. Added to this will be the complexity of living with the pandemic for the immediately foreseeable future, which means paying an ongoing attention to the quality of isolation and quarantine centers, guarding our communities against misinformation, and spreading a message of solidarity and not discrimination. We are fortunate to have strong partners like the University of Montreal who have years of experience in public health and community response, to work with us in this marathon run that will clearly not end any time soon.

Finally, as work resumes in the factories but with a reduced workforce, we ask ourselves each day how the working class struggle will change shape. Our platforms are reporting that permanent workers are getting employment while casual workers are queuing up outside factories. Social distancing is not actively being followed during work. Landlords are threatening to charge arrears which they forego during the lockdown, especially since much of their clientele has left for their villages or are in the process of leaving. Many governments and industry stalwarts feel that it is better to relax labour laws, stall minimum wage increases, and increase working hours without overtime pay, rather than step up on worker safety and wellbeing, and increase direct tax collections to finance essential public services. What are the workers thinking?

Going forward, we have two specific asks:

1.       We have developed a lot of content related to COVID-19 awareness, relief schemes, escalation processes in case of problems, and have ready to use IVR setups that can be rapidly deployed in new geographies. We are looking for new partners who may want to use these systems in geographies, especially in hotspot areas where the situation is more critical. Please write to us to use our platforms in your areas of work. We have built small tutorials to get you started, on community mobilization, content contribution, and impact pathways.

2.       We are launching a campaign from next week, titled #NotStatusQuo, to specifically identify systemic issues in the delivery of welfare schemes and social security that need to be addressed urgently so that once the pandemic eases up, the situation does not revert to business as usual. We are looking at issues with PDS, DBT, worker documentation, and administration-panchayat-community communication systems. Please watch out on our social media (Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin) and also write to us to collaborate on this campaign.

Further, all our content is publicly available. We are also grateful to so many of our content partners who have contributed their content, including the Sesame Workshop, Noora Health, ICDS Bihar, Haqdarshak, UNICEF, JEEViKA, Tata Trust, and so many more. We have developed 150+ capsules, which have been heard by 300K people, and additionally 8800+ voice reports have been contributed by our users on different issues. See the dashboard for the latest stats, and just write to us at covid-response@gramvaani.org if you need anything at all.

Sincerely

The Gram Vaani team

Jul 19th, 2020 – An updated summary of our COVID-19 response is available here.

Throughout the lockdown, and thereon, we were engaged in running several campaigns in our communities. Here is a short note that summarizes our work so far, and a short articulation of our manifesto that drives us for all this work.

Aug 12th, 2020 – We recently concluded the #verified campaign with the United Nations, coordinated by purpose.com, on preventing misinformation. Do watch the video here and the tweet on the UN official handle acknowledging our work.

Here are two nice articles on CHIRAG Vaani, running in the Chakai block of the Jamui district in Bihar. In partnership with PRADAN, our ambition is to grow this more widely in the Santhal Parganas:

• Short audio clips help students learn in rural Bihar, in Tehelka
• How interactive audio helped migrants during lockdown, in VillageSquare
• This seminar on youth-led creative learning practices amongst indigenous communities, was fully booked with an audience from 26 countries who attended our presentations. Theatre, mud wall painting, and participatory films, were used alongside the Mobile Vaani IVR and app systems for communities to share knowledge about dietary diversity.

Another nice article about the wonderful work being done by Slam Out Loud on creative story telling, poetry and theater. Slam Out Loud is also using our IVR platforms to reach those cut off due to the digital divide.

Our partner PCI (Project Concern International) has written a great description of our work with JEEViKA (Bihar Rural Livelihood Promotion Society) during the lockdown. JEEViKA and PCI have been amazing partners in leveraging our platforms to provide COVID-19 related awareness among SHG (Self Help Group) members, and also to provide employment support to migrant workers who came back during the lockdown.

Our work through the lockdown on highlighting problems faced by rural and low-income communities has been highlighted by CGAP in their paper ‘Elevating the Collective Consumer Voice in Financial Regulation’ on listening to consumer voices to improve the delivery of financial development programmes.