EPIC Community Education Platform

A partnership with IBM will launch an innovative community engagement platform that facilitates two-way communication between public health officials and citizens using basic mobile phones. Unlike many traditional approaches that are only one-directional, from public health officials to citizens, this novel approach closes the feedback loop and generates real-time, on-the ground information about public perceptions and community needs. The platform provides disease education through localized public health messages distributed via radio (and other traditional channels such as civil society leaders) and empowers community members to call or SMS their reply to questions or report situations in their location. The user feedback is then analyzed to identify possible barriers to behavior change and turned into actionable insights for stakeholders, as well as to create a heat-map or other graphics to visualize the impact of the disease.