Episode 18
Designing Chatbots for Social Development
This week we are joined by Isabelle Amazon-Brown to speak about Designing Chatbots for Social Development. With ten years experience in 'mobiles for development', working on projects funded by UNICEF, DfID, USAID and the World Bank . She started out running and designing feature-phone friendly mobile sites, but in the past few years has been working on chatbots. She's “passionately jaded” about digital development, having seen more projects “fail” than succeed, but still believes in the transformative potential of mobile, if initiatives are designed and developed using the right methodologies, and as part of a considered ecosystem which leverages both traditional and digital approaches.
Or listen on Apple Podcasts.
Resources:
Follow Isabelle on Twitter @ISABELLEAMAZON
Connect with Isabelle on LinkedIn
Read the paper New Digital Ways of Delivering Sex Education co-authored by Isabelle, about new methods of sex education for adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa through mobile phones.
Read Isabelle’s Using WhatsApp to combat Gender Based Violence a series of blogs by Isabelle tracing each step of an iterative approach to digital programme design.
Read Isabelle’s reflections on designing chatbots in the blog 3 Big Questions Before Funding a M4D Solution.
Learn the 7 steps implementers can take to improve the safeguarding of chatbots for digital sexuality education and support in the UNICEF brief Innovation and Technology for Gender Equality, Chatbots and Safeguarding.
Read the article How Content Publishers Can Contribute to Covid-19 Digital Response by ICTworks.
Discover the project MomConnect an initiative funded by The Breakout Foundation for the South African National Department of Health.
Learn more about DIAL (Digital Impact Alliance), the organisation that advances digital inclusion to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Discover the case study funded by DIAL on the Amigo Anônimo project, which was supported by Facebook: Amigo Anônimo (Anonymous Friend), Alcoholics Anonymous Brazil.
Learn more about the Big Sis project by Girl Effect.
Read the article Meet Big Sis: the chatbot with the potential to reach millions of girls with advice on sexual health on the Girl Effect website.
Read more about the Case Study in the Turn.io report A private space for girls to get answers to questions they feel they can’t ask anyone else.