Innovation: Our Shared Responsibility
IT WAS EARLY SEPTEMBER 2017. Victoria Maskell, based in UNICEF’s Panama office, was sitting in an emergency meeting about Hurricane Irma, looking at a terrifying swirl of red, yellow and green with blue edges moving towards the Caribbean. The hurricane, which had strengthened into a Category Five storm, would do considerable damage once it hit landfall, and Maskell was looking for ways to support emergency preparedness for local populations that might be otherwise unreachable.
Her thoughts soon turned to U-Report, a mobile empowerment platform created by UNICEF that provides children with access to health and education. UNICEF had created the platform to take advantage of its reach in close to 200 countries, using social messaging and SMS channels on mobile phones to gather opinions on topics of interest to its partners and stakeholders.
Maskell recalled how the organization had used U-Report to answer questions and provide information about the Zika virus and a recent deployment to Peru after severe flooding. In both instances, U-Report was used on a very small scale to understand the situation of young people and to send ‘stay safe’ messages.
Maskell thought U-Report could be a great way to spread information about a predictable disaster like a hurricane. So she worked with representatives from seven other UNICEF offices, including , its senior digital and data specialist who was working in New York; , global U-report coordinator based in Bangkok; and seven online volunteers. The team provided around-the-clock coverage, receiving and processing questions from around the globe. UNICEF sent information to more than 25,000 U-Report members and answered 8,000 individual questions on the platform. For 80 per cent of the youth reached, it was their only source of information regarding how to prepare for the hurricane, and 80 per cent of
