A real highlight this week was a talk by Luke Church and Sharath Srinivasan of Africa’s Voices Foundation. It is a rare delight to see a genuinely interdisciplinary presentation, combining computer science and social science perspectives – and to have speakers recognise that the audience likely understood terms such as ‘integrity’ very differently. Both speakers brought...
In response to the humanitarian emergency in Somalia in 2017, AVF developed an innovative system and workflow for targeted behaviour change messaging. Through this process AVF categorised SMS messages sent in to interactive radio programmes reporting barriers to adopting life-saving behaviours, such as water treatment and exclusive breastfeeding. Then, AVF delivered tailored responses to affected...
In late May, the Communication with Disaster Affected Communities Network held its annual global forum in Nairobi. More than 160 participants from over 20 countries came together to discuss the challenges facing aid professionals in the context of the digital era and advent of new technologies. Specifically, the discussion centred around digital exclusion as an...
This is a guest post by Isatou Batanon, Social Policy Specialist, UNICEF Somalia. It first appeared on UNDG Silo Fighters. Somalia is slowly emerging from decades of conflict, recurrent drought and mass population movements, and is currently on a trajectory towards greater peace and stability. A federal structure has been in place since 2012, with the...
The extended drought in Somalia continues to have a devastating impact across the country. Since early 2017, when the crisis deteriorated and the threat of famine loomed, the number of people in emergency level of food insecurity (IPC Phase 4) has increased to 866,000. Over the same period, over 1,159 people lost their lives in...
I have been preoccupied with the phrase “valuing voices” ever since the earliest days of Africa’s Voices as a pilot research project at the University of Cambridge. It has all sorts of meanings and motivations: a call to arms, an ethical commitment, a cautionary counsel, a methodological challenge amidst data revolutions, a test for people...
How can organisations design programmes that are grounded in citizen’s everyday realities? Click through to open an in-depth interactive page on Africa’s Voices approach — with a focus on health-related research with UNICEF Somalia. Open Spend some time discovering our innovative method and analysis techniques, as well as the key insights into citizen’s beliefs on...
It’s April 2017, and DJ Bling and Bonoko at Ghetto Radio, Nairobi, are on air discussing the challenges faced by school-going girls while on their period. They are joined by a guest, Teresa, who is a trained counsellor on Sexual and Reproductive Health issues working with LVCT Health. They have been reading out the following...
This summer, Africa’s Voices was lucky to have two computational linguistics interns join our team. Gladys Tyen built on a web-app for crowdsourcing sentiment analysis, and Lis Kerr worked on a governance project with Well Told Story. Here they share what they got up to, and the challenges and achievements along the way. Gladys: Let’s teach...
To draw meaningful insights from thousands of text messages in low-resource languages is difficult. To tackle this challenge, we’ve collaborated with the University of Cambridge to develop tools that help to streamline our data analysis approach. Here, Professor Alan Blackwell from Cambridge’s Computer Lab explains the inner workings of one such tool: CODA. CODA is...
