The Challenge
How can a charity working to support families in Kenya continue to help keep children engaged in learning?
The COVID-19 pandemic is continuing to have a big effect on peoples lives across the world
In addition to the havoc being wreaked on health and the economy Childrens education is also caught up in the virus fallout.
The inability for charities in the sector to use face to face learning an support is a particular challenge for The Dignitas Education Project in Kenya – who have look to innovative technologiical solutions in supporting their leaders of learning in helping to keeping children – and their guardian learn throughout the pandemic.
We’ve been helpng the Dignitas project usiog conversational AI, automation and live coaching to ’empower teachers and transform schools in Kenya through leadership training, instructional coaching and infrastructure support’
The plan
The Dignitas Project in Kenya operates with a ‘leaders of learning’ model. Where local educational leaders are assigned to a group of families, to help both parents and children, deal with the uncertainty, stress and challenges of the current pandemic.
A bit part of this is in giving them support through technology to help them to understand through modules of learning themselves – such as how to deal with anxiety in parents or guardians, as well as the actual learnng that children need to keep growing,
We have worked closely with the leadership team to understand how best we could support the leaders and those within their learning groups, through an AI, conversational and automation lens.
This has come to life with the ‘Leaders of Learning’ digital assistant, which is availble to all leaders on Facebook Messenger – a platform that offers rich functionality across messaging, learning content and live chat with leadership coaches to support them.
What we did
Talking through the main issues and challenges with the core team was the first step – understanding how people use the centre and services, how young people interact, ensuring they have access to youth workers and their key needs.
Taking a quick-start lean approach to our conversational AI framework diagnosis – we uncovered the most important FAQs, what people use their website and social channels for – what the most common questions were asked all helped to get a better view for how the conversational interaction could be most effective.
Getting it moving
With the quick start diagnosis complete, we then got cracking on the – Prescribe phase – from this we sketched out the flow and conversation within the chatbot, keeping in mind different user needs – from those who use the centre, carers and parents
Each were given a personalised route for the most important information to be relayed
Types of content
Automating communication and directing users of the centre or their carers/parents to talk to a youth worker, was clearly one of the most important parts of the chatbot.
This was surfaced immediately with the ability to quickly complete a simple conversational form that would automatically notify a qualified youth zone worker of questions, updates or possible issues.
We also added NLP elements to ensure if a young person was using key words, slang or acronymns to flag up a potential issue that the chatbot could also respond in an appropriate way
Bot workings
Coronavirus and its impact on the charity services – including the youth centre being closed – was also very important, this was available in the main menu areas – and through using NLP techniques users could ask questions around the subject.
We added an FAQ section (not just COVID-19 questions) to keep users up to date, encourage people to join and give out contact, location and direction details.
For donations we utilised webview functionality to direct possible donators to the Youth Zone website, where they could join the effort to raise funds.
There also the addition of a volunteering section, giving information about how to help as well as social feeds.
What to do next
Next iterations can include features around social games and interactions to keep users of MYZ services entertained and occupied during the lockdown period. More advanced NLP and conversations based on user input as well as exploring other conversational AI platforms, including voice will be reviewed.
We’re supporting Charities, NGOs, social enterprises and non-profits during the coronavirus pandemic – helping them use conversational AI, voice, chatbots and automation to keep communicating with their users, donators and fundraisers.
We are not charging for this service – its the right thing to do and we’re just keen to help as many organisations as we can, using our expertise to keep their organisations going.
Please drop us a line at hello@thesynthetic.co if you would like advice or to get a chatbot or voice intiative up and running quickly.
Conversations Worth Millions
