© 2020 Arifu. All Rights Reserved
Author: Lokendra Singh
By Osman Siddiqi
Observing COVID-19 is like trying to count stars
Recently, I was introduced to an analogy that described how difficult it was to fully grasp the likely scale of COVID-19 infections. The analogy compared COVID-19 to the stars. Strange, indeed. Though, this analogy works in two ways. First, we can only observe some of the stars in the universe regardless of whether we look up with our naked eye or peer through the most powerful telescopes. Despite immense technological advances in the past 100 years, we still cannot document all or even most of the stars in the universe.
Second, when we look at the stars, we are always looking at the past as light travels minutes to years to touch upon our corneas. Similarly, observed tallies of COVID-19 are more often than not a reflection of infections that emerged in the past, whether by a few hours or by several days, and not a measure of the true number of cases at any point in time.
Given that it is so difficult to observe the spread of the infection, it is difficult to comprehend the expected impacts on families, the economy, and health systems within and across countries. This, in turn, creates immense policy challenges and decisions for governments, particularly in allocating resources, and ensuring that residents are well-informed and behave optimally to look after themselves, their families, absolute strangers, and the healthcare system at large.
Contextualizing information to increase relevance
We believe the information dispatched to the wider public needs to be further contextualized to the day-to-day problems households, small businesses, and food supply chains are facing, problems that will be exacerbated in the coming weeks, particularly in developing countries. In addition, this information needs to amplify and complement the efforts of locally-based organizations, whether they are networks of primary health services, skill-builders, or financial service providers (inter alia).
It has been said time and time again, interpreting social distancing is not a straightforward task. How do you ‘social distance’ when you reside in jam-packed residential areas or informal settlements? Or if you run a shop that provides basic goods that households need, without which you would force households to travel longer distances and limit their ability to (you guessed it) social distance? How about with the regular washing of hands when many developing countries still struggle to provide consistent access to water during even the best of times?
But it’s crucial to go further. COVID-19 is, of course, not just a health information issue. It brings to sharp relief the co-dependence our respective livelihoods have. Therefore, how do you ensure that farmers, small business owners, youth, women, and more have the right financial, structural, and emotional support structures in place? Lastly, and crucially, who should be delivering this information to them? Who do these individuals, households, and communities trust?
Crisis-driven opportunities to innovate
COVID-19 is paradoxically, or perhaps expectedly, offering large and small companies alike a powerful incentive to innovate on existing business processes and integrate services with other companies more and more. We believe this is where Arifu can play a crucial role, particularly with our digital learning solution.
Arifu is a chatbot which currently serves 1.2m users through our digital learning platform. As a company, we work to identify relevant information, digitize, and dispatch user-friendly content to enable better informed decision-making for end users, or learners as we refer to them. The tools we provide can complement, integrate within, and amplify not just the response other organizations have during COVID-19, but can act as building blocks for how organizations learn and grow in the future. This vision is predicated on a few simple guiding principles:
- Approach the challenge COVID-19 presents through assisting multiple sectors. Recognizing that this is not just a health or mortality issue, but one that cuts across livelihoods, supply chains, crime, mental health, and empathy-led citizenry.
- Develop partnerships with trusted frontline services and digital infrastructure companies. This can non-exhaustively include healthcare networks, agribusinesses, financial service providers, telecommunication companies, and communications and payment API providers.
- Contextualize information on safety, risk, and innovation opportunities for learners. This is to make high level advice equitable and actionable in nature. For example, this could involve contextualizing social distancing messaging within communities or for creating actionable advice for micro and small enterprises on how to leverage new tools on the market like WhatsApp business or delivery platforms or how do you advise farming households navigate the trifecta of locusts, COVID-19, and increasing rainfall volatility.
- Deploy needed information and access to services through relevant, accessible, and user-friendly digital platforms free of cost to users. This is to ensure equal and easy access to equitably designed information and services.
- Rapidly learn and improve information as needed or demanded. Recognizing that perfect is the enemy of the good, but that excellence in service should always be sought and iterated towards.
- Focus on building tools that will continue to drive value for partners and learners for the longer term as the crisis subsides. Digital platforms need to be nimble in their design to allow for adaptation to differing needs. This will allow for scalability across geographies, population segments, and downstream over time.
To make this vision a reality, we have published a call for partnerships to rapidly amplify responses to COVID-19 across sectors and build innovative, resilient solutions and services for small businesses, farmers, health service providers, and supply chains, as we emerge from the crisis. The document describes how these partnerships can work step by step starting from how partner expertise leads to content creation, Arifu digital design, infrastructure, and quality assurance digitizes the content, subsequent to which the content is launched for those who use the partner’s services and those on Arifu’s platform, and how the research questions and methods are co-developed. Subsequently, we measure engagement rates, jointly pursue co-defined research methods, and inform each other’s operations.
The pandemic has introduced an unprecedented challenge for how we engage with each other, our health systems, and how we structure the building blocks of our economies. Unprecedented challenges require us all to be innovative and to charge forward with all the creativity we can muster. And while it may sound cliche, unprecedented challenges compel us to shoot for the stars.
© 2020 Arifu. All Rights Reserved
Categories
Data Hub Visioning
By Osman Siddiqi
Attending day long (or multi-day) long conferences and workshops can create a feeling of cautious uncertainty. The promise for such events is often about facilitating thoughtful collaboration and meaningful networking, identifying new knowledge, capabilities, or talent which otherwise may be missed, and, in effect, learn from and get inspired by like-yet-differently-minded individuals from really cool organizations. Rarely do conferences succeed at fulfilling these promises.
At the Data Hub Visioning Workshop, held at the Radisson Blu in Nairobi, this experience manifested in spades.
Arifu, will be part of the implementing cohort attempting to reach farmers digitally with training content on drought-resistant Irish potatoes and poultry. The workshop was engaging, interactive, and highly collaborative in nature. We had the opportunity to meet with agronomists, digital advisory firms, public data product developers, as well as innovative policy-makers (such as Director Boniface Akuku of KALRO). This helped considerably elucidate the variety of thinking, shared goals, and possible pathways to achieve those goals in a highly productive manner.
Organized by KALRO, MercyCorps, the World Bank , and Dalberg, the goal of the workshop was to bring in all relevant stakeholders under the One Million Farmer project to identify (in my own words):
Vision and possibilities:
- What data exists publicly and within institutions?
- What data needs exist across institutions?
- What data are institutions willing to share and in what format?
- How can data-based collaborations drive improvements in operations and, hopefully in effect, improvements in the lives of farmers?
https://twitter.com/OsmSiddiqi/status/1227545351437066241?s=20
Challenges and the creation of a roadmap
- What concerns institutions have in sharing that data?
- What are the risks associated with sharing that data to farmers and institutions?
- How can those concerns be alleviated?
- How can personally identifiable data on farmers be protected?
- What is the efficient path forward?
If successful in creating a data ecosystem, several efficiencies in product design and development, as well as individual organization hesitations in data-sharing, could be tackled. That said…
There’s lots of data on the demand for data
At Arifu, we’re big fans of problem, theory, and evidence-driven approaches to the design of solutions which can be scaled through market forces. The subset of what we know, what problems farmers face, what they demand, what data we have or data we can get, and ultimately, what we are capable of building and driving at scale offers the best possible solution design. To answer some of these questions we are dependent on leveraging existing data ecosystems, creating our own, and actively sharing analytics with our partners. This effort needs to go further in at least recognizing the following ways:
Continuously listening to farmers: rapidly changing agricultural context due to climate change begs us to be more agile in our design and testing of solutions along planting cycles for crops. In addition, it forces us to think about solutions that can adapt to the annual weather volatility stemming from climate change. Farmer voices across crops and rapid just-in-time data must complement the history of research in the design of solutions.
Academic findings: summarized findings from the reams of academic research would add immense value to stakeholders if packaged correctly. As such, these summaries should not solely focus on the p-values and effect sizes on key outcomes of interest, which while immensely important, are hardly the sole value-addition of publicly available research. The summaries should highlight interim metrics through a program’s theory of change (for example, not just yield, but behavior change), the drivers and inhibitors of these measures (for example, what types of behavior change were associated with metrics of interest), and what might be ways to improve intended outcomes cost-efficiently and at scale given what the research has learned. Simply put, why did something work or not work and what can we do to improve outcomes at scale?
(One example of a great summary is here. The powerful insights here still require probing, iterative experiments to understand how to operationalize the ideas, and creativity in solving the identified problems, but they are highly informative pieces.)
More is not necessarily better: the two efforts above should inform what data, with what quality, at what specificity, and at what frequency is necessary to drive results for farmers. Not all data is equal or necessary. Data that is demanded by our research teams is not necessarily going to solve farmer problems. In other words, it is quite easy to come up with machine learning-driven predictive algorithms through swathes of data, but it is difficult to create relevant and riskless solutions for the farming household.
Don’t get us wrong, we love data!
Arifu believes that access to relevant information is a fundamental freedom for all people and it is a promise that has yet to be fulfilled by the advent of the World Wide Web. We also believe that engagement with our learners at scale with relevant information should improve the median learner’s decision-making capability and quality of life. Because of this, throughout our operations and research, we put our learners’ voices, our partners, and relevant data as central to our design and scale strategy.
At Arifu, we’re excited to see how we can further drive quality of life improvements for farmers directly and by amplifying the impact of our public and private sector partners through partnerships like the One Million Farmer project, by leveraging existing research, actively listening to farmers to inform our design, and using the right data.
© 2020 Arifu. All Rights Reserved
By Osman Siddiqi
It is difficult to speak about Arifu without bringing up Zachary Ndegwa. Zachary was once a farmer from a village called Luma in Meru county, Kenya. In 2015, when Zachary first interacted with Arifu on his feature phone, he had a quarter acre tomato farm, the yields from which were sole means for providing for his family.
At first, Zachary thought Arifu’s free-to-use chatbot was a person. By chatting with Arifu, he began learning how to grow healthier tomatoes by choosing the right seeds, applying fertilizer correctly, and much more. After learning, Zachary decided to take a not so insignificant risk. He chose to trust and apply the advice he was receiving from these texts. Much to Zachary’s relief, his tomato production and his income increased. This realization continued to drive his engagement with the Arifu chatbot.
In 2019, we revisited Zachary and found that he is no longer growing tomatoes himself. Instead, Zachary has trained other farmers using the practices he learned from Arifu and now buys tomatoes from those farmers to sell in the market. Both Zachary’s income and status in his community have grown and he attributes this change of fortune in his family’s life to his continuous interactions with Arifu.
Enhancing skills at scale
Zachary’s story exemplifies the type of impact Arifu strives to have on the lives of all learners who interact with our platform. Arifu incorporates expert advice, insights from human-centered design research, and behavioral economics principles to create actionable educational content that builds learner capacity on a wide range of topics. In addition, through its interface, Arifu connects end-users to the ecosystem of products and services, such as financial services or inputs to agriculture. By delivering this content through multiple digital channels, including SMS, Arifu aims to bridge the digital divide by creating, curating, and delivering useful information for those without access. We aspire to make this information demand-driven, needs-based, timely and actionable in order to positively impact lives.
Recent academic literature suggests that SMS-based extension services, particularly in the form of advice, if actionable and targeted well, can be quite effective in improving farm outcomes for the poor. In addition, insights from Arifu’s ongoing research suggests that learners who engage with content state they find the content useful and applying it has improved their quality of life.
As of the end of 2019, Arifu has well over a million learners. As we continue to scale, it has become increasingly important to ensure that Arifu’s reach adds value to as many of our learners as possible. To drive impact, it is simply not sufficient to create content and deliver it en masse. Nor is it sufficient to have high engagement levels with the deployed content. Impact requires solving real challenges learners face by continuously measuring the right things and innovating in order to improve. To achieve this it is important to measure learning accurately and being able to understand whether learning is resulting in meaningful behavior change. One tool we have developed to tackle this challenge is an algorithm we have dubbed the Skills Score.
The Skills Score measures learning and the ability of learners to apply the content they engaged with. The three key components which make up the Skills Score are knowledge graphs which map how concepts relate to one other, quizzes to assess and reinforce learning for learners, and increasingly complex questions within those quizzes that measure the ability of learners to use what they learned to, for example, evaluate situations and create solutions. We believe these questions should allow us to not just measure knowledge improvements, but to also predict how well learners are able to apply the content they engaged with. The Skills Score should add value in (at least) the following ways:
- Identify where learners have skill gaps allowing us to personalize trainings to help improve learning at the right level for the right content.
- Identify how effective Arifu trainings are at building skills and how to improve them.
- Enhance the quality of engagement with learners through the provision of increasingly timely and relevant content to enable them to make more informed decisions.
- Understand and drive predictive power of content engagement, Skills Scores, and meaningful behavior change.
- Communicate which skills have been learned by learners to our partner organizations so they can make more informed strategic decisions.
Ultimately the Skills Score can be used to enhance Arifu’s ability as a digital coach operating at massive scale. It promises to enhance the cost-efficiency, dynamism, and impact of delivering trainings on demanded and needed information to learners globally thus enabling Arifu to fulfill its mission in significant ways.
Our commitment to impact
The global digital divide is still a long way away in creating access to the treasure trove of publicly available information many of us take for granted. Even so, it is not easy to identify information that is immediately relevant for driving our own capabilities. This is the gap Arifu seeks to bridge. Our research strategy is predicated upon a theory of change aiming to bridge these gaps in knowledge and improve the chances of social mobility for households. We know there are many Zacharys among our learners. His story speaks to the need for tools and systems that are right fit solutions and enable people to drive change using newfound knowledge and utilizing immediate resources available in their ecosystem.
While theories, anecdotes, and visions are necessary, they alone are not sufficient. Learning, iteration, creativity, and credible proof points are needed. Arifu has committed to hold itself accountable to the goal of impacting lives in meaningful ways. We will pursue this by leveraging the suite of research tools that have been developed in the development and technology sectors. We believe the Skills Score is one tool which will help us serve people with what they need, when they need it, as we learn about what their capabilities are and what they could become.
© 2020 Arifu. All Rights Reserved
Categories
Introduction to Arifu
When we first launched our digital learning platform, Arifu, in 2015, we still had many questions about how our product should be designed to address the deep information gaps that exist globally, preventing billions from accessing relevant, affordable training and information to improve their quality of life.
One of those questions was, “will learners engage differently with our product if Arifu is introduced as a person versus as a platform?”. We saw major tech companies around the world asking similar questions and investing in their conversational AI personalities — Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and so on — to make access to information more natural, efficient, and friendly and usher in an entirely new era of digital services. Might the same approach yield results for mass-market audiences in emerging and frontier economies including the billions who have access to phones but not the internet?
The answer, it turned out, was “yes”. Our research with CGAP, Vodacom, and TechnoServe delivering financial education to rural Tanzanian audiences over interactive SMS showed that the content introducing Arifu as a person had between 15% to 25% higher interactions than Arifu as a platform. Subsequent independent research showed upwards of 400-500% increase in contributions to savings among farmers in Tanzania. With that, the Arifu platform became an interactive chatbot with one mission: to place information and opportunity in reach of everyone, one chat at a time.
As part of that mission, we are excited to launch the Arifu blog, a forum that allows us at Arifu to share what we are learning with a variety of audiences interested in the application of basic and advanced technology for social impact and shared prosperity.
Our upcoming posts will be categorized around the four intersecting topics of Innovation, Impact, Partnerships, and Life at Arifu. Each category speaks to essential aspects of Arifu’s engagement with our stakeholders from our learners, team members, corporate and government partnerships, and the wider ecosystem. The inaugural post on our blog is by Arifu’s Director of Research & Impact, Osman Siddiqi, on the promising role predictive analytics can play in digital advisory services for improving livelihoods. The post particularly speaks to Arifu’s Skills Score, a set of algorithms for dynamically measuring learning and predicting behavior change among learners.
We hope you enjoy learning with us and invite you to share your thoughts on our blogs. Please reach out at info@arifu.com if you would like to collaborate and let’s keep learning together. We look forward to keeping the conversation going.
Marisa Conway & Craig Heintzman,
Chief Learning Officer, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-Founders of Arifu.
© 2020 Arifu. All Rights Reserved