ATMAGO - Neighbors helping Neighbors

AtmaGo is a web-based social network and Android app used by 260,000 people across Indonesia. We connect women to share solutions and improve safety during floods, traffic and crime, and help find jobs, housing, and affordable food. On AtmaGo, women are selling handmade products and learning to become entrepreneurs.

Communities around the world, but especially in the developing world, face a growing risk from natural and human-caused disasters.  Disasters lower women’s life expectancy more than men’s according to data from 141 countries affected by disasters between 1981 and 2002.  Women, boys and girls are 14 times more likely than men to die during a disaster (Source: UNDP).  These countries rarely have the resources to support local efforts to respond and recover from disasters.

Our theory is that people living in low income communities are resourceful, ingenious and have information and solutions that have no easy way to spread. We know women are more likely to survive disasters when they have good social networks and connections. Our review of academic research finds that AtmaGo helps users take preventative action in disaster: (https://atmaconnect.org/772-2). Users trust information on AtmaGo knowing that it comes from their own community. In January 2016, a terrorist attack occurred in Jakarta, generating a 300% increase in user traffic on AtmaGo with users sharing information on areas to avoid.

AtmaGo is a critical tool for women in urban poor communities to share information that helps them prepare, recover, and be resilient to disasters, and share solutions to daily challenges around food, water, and public safety. Our impact is a reduction in mortality, morbidity, and property damage due to timely early warnings delivered to people’s mobile phones, along with information about how to mitigate and prevent disasters.  Since launching, AtmaGo’s 260,000 users have shared 30,000 messages on flooding, fires, crime, jobs, and education. AtmaGo has proven to be a platform for low-income residents of Indonesia to report public safety issues. 

Track the number of women using AtmaGo to report issues. - 150,000 new women users in 2017-2018

Track the number of solutions to problems and disasters; provided on AtmaGo by women: # of relevant posts

- 5,000 tips and solutions to problems and neighborhood issues and resources shared by women on AtmaGo

Track the number of women sharing information, posting and accessing AtmaGo for information. - Women users gain access to employment, disaster alerts, and public safety issues.

AtmaGo, unlike Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp, is focused on low-income users and local communities. AtmaGo solves the place-based needs of communities better than these apps because the content is geographically organized and useful. Facebook can connect a user with friends around the world and Twitter organizes users around interests—but neither service provides a simple way to find users in your neighborhood. WhatsApp in Indonesia is mainly used for one-to-one or small group communication. Our secret sauce is hyper local, user-generated content focused on people helping people. 

AtmaGo built a widely available free technology to empower billions of urban poor people to improve their own lives and communities from the ground up. We know people living in poor communities have critical information on neighborhood problems and crises, but no easy way to share solutions with others. We came together to create a lean start up in the non-profit world focused on using human centered design to meet the needs of urban poor people. AtmaGo was designed, tested and launched in Indonesia's urban poor communities and is accessible for free by basic phones, smart phones and desktop computers.

AtmaGo is a free mobile web and Android app currently in use in the Indonesian market. Users connect using their own mobile phones using 3G, 4G, and LTE. Our approach uses internet-connected mobile phones to encourage people to: receive and act on real-time emergency warnings, report problems with urban infrastructure, create and share resources that empower local communities, and grow their local economies. Our approach is infinitely flexible and scalable—as 3G and 4G/LTE connectivity increases, AtmaGo can empower local people to solve local problems in communities around the world.

We have sustained our operations and launched our product because of our institutional funders and major individual donors. We have received major grants from the Cisco Foundation and have won global competitions including the IDEO.org Amplify Urban Resilience Challenge and the Global Resilience Partnership. We anticipate supplementing grants with earned income from professional services that flow from large partners and from local, regional and national government agencies. We will also collect important data about urban poor communities from our dashboard that can provide valuable insights for agency partners to purchase. 

AtmaGo is a world-class technology product that in order to compete with some of the larger social media platforms such as Facebook, Nextdoor or Twitter, we often require more resources than we have access to as a non-profit. We are limited by factors such as operating as a lean nonprofit with minimal capital resources and networks to bring on more top-tier engineers and product development staff, as well as a sales and marketing force to take us to our next level of growth.  

https://twitter.com/atmagoapp/

https://www.facebook.com/AtmaGoApp/

https://www.linkedin.com/company-beta/7965657/

We are applying to Solve because we need your help to reach billions of people globally with a new way of solving the intractable problems of development by unleashing the trapped knowledge in low-income communities. We need experts to help us build out our earned income strategy so we can have the resources to iterate and improve AtmaGo to create a world class user experience and scale globally. We also need connections to larger institutional donors, and we need your expertise on scaling technology products to build a sales and marketing force to launch in new countries. 

Cisco Foundation

Mercy Corps Indonesia

Mercy Corps

Ombudsman of the Republic of Indonesia

LAPOR!

Ideo.org

Jakarta Disaster Management Agency

Center for Innovation Policy and Governance 

Twilio

Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nextdoor, Qlue