We Count, Counting Ourselves
Many of the world’s poorest citizens are invisible in development data. During the COVID 2nd wave in India, journalists and policy-makers scrambled to understand how bad COVID is in rural areas.
We Count, Counting Ourselves is an AI powered layer of Video Volunteers hyperlocal network of citizen journalists in India. The data collected will be made available into data registries and we will integrate the key facts into hyperlocal social media conversations. This will enable solution-taking, provide timely data to experts and bridge the communications gaps that hamper citizen-state synergy. As of 17 July 2020, UN Stats has designated 106 out of 129 SDG indicators as Tier 2, meaning '...data are not regularly produced by countries.' Much of the data towards those indicators can be gathered by citizens. When our solution scales globally, it will enable citizens to hold governments to account for maintaining progress on the SDGs.
There is not enough COVID (and other) data collected in a systematic way from India’s rural areas. Anecdotal community-led stories have emerged and directories created, however the system lacks the layer of trustworthy community hubs that can activate and collect the data in a way that can be effectively used by the government and international agencies, and referenced by journalists and activists.
This has accelerated COVID’s spread, by preventing aid agencies from allocating scarce resources like oxygen to the most needy blocks/districts.
Much missing public health data could be provided bottom-up, by citizens themselves, e.g, the quality of the village public health center; # of people with COVID symptoms; # ambulances; hospital wait times. But citizen-generated is not currently used by any govt agency.
A national citizen-generated data ecosystem doesn’t exist because of the historical indifference of authorities in listening to/valuing the voices of the poor, prejudice against the trustworthiness of citizen-generated data, and, until recently, poor digital connectivity.
It’s also been difficult to access rural citizens at scale to enlist them as enumerators, or to penetrate their WhatsApp groups. The rural poor are mostly on WhatsApp, not twitter, so NLP to gather citizen’s data is almost impossible.
Our solution is to scale the impact on government functioning of our existing hyperlocal network of grassroots citizen journalists across 200 districts through AI chatbots.
They will recruit data collectors near them to gather data on COVID. This will happen via an-easy-to use surveying chatbotWhatsApp (widely used by 400m+ people in India and increasing) that will push out many COVID data questions each week to gather millions of data points. This is based on our 15 months’ experience providing/influencing COVID relief across 200 districts and making these communities ‘COVID prepared'.
Through grassroots NGO partnerships and social media virality - responding to citizens’ healthy desire to monitor government -our application will become popular across the country, as citizens take our surveys. An additional bot present in the whatsapp groups will support our Correspondent to identify COVID misinformation in her whatsapp groups so she can respond. It will also monitor and classify utterances to gather further citizen-generated COVID data.
Our solution improves the ability of government, civil society and market actors to integrate and solve together & manifests two characteristics - Emitting (ie broadcasting insights for immediate visibility via social media & journalists who take notice & amplify) & Building (for long term sustainability).
We are working to directly and meaningfully improve the lives of rural and peri-urban households in India that are currently not receiving government programs they are intended to receive -including health services like COVID testing or adequately staffed local health clinics. This population - of those who are currently invisible to the particular programs meant to serve them- is huge. $122 billion is allocated for over 1000 government anti-poverty schemes each year, but much is unspent each year, in part because it is extremely difficult for citizens to escalate a grievance, ie, make themselves heard, when they are unfairly refused access to a government program. For instance, a survey found that 40% of the government’s Jah Dhan accounts could not access the government’s COVID relief. This program is directed at approximately 200 million women, which may mean that up to 80 million are unable to access it. This is what it means to be voiceless vis a vis the government. This solution will meaningfully address their needs by enabling their own village-level data on health crises and health infrastructure (as well as other poverty-related issues) to quickly, regularly and in an organized fashion to come forward. This data will relate to 'data gaps,' ie, areas where the data is either absent or not usable/accessible by citizens. Armed with such data, the communities and their advocates/allies in the government, NGO world, media and CSR space will be able to work together and co-create solutions and thus improve citizen-state synergy.
As India's largest community media organization, Video Volunteers deeply understands their needs - we have facilitated over 8000 community videos to date, all of which deal with community problems & solutions, based on the principle that people have a right to speak for themselves rather than be spoken for, in their own articulate, and unmediated voice. Filling in data gaps is core to our work - since 2006, we have monitored the implementation of the RTE (education) act and maternal health services, provided granular data across many districts related to electrification and ‘ground truthed’ the government's statement that it had made India 'open defecation free'. In our program 'Surveys for Action' we have gathered in depth quantitative data on numerous issues, including COVID preparedness and the spread of vaccine disinformation, at a time when the news media was paying no attention to these two issues. Within 200 WhatsApp Action Groups that we have set up, we are listening to and engaging with communities around COVID solutions. With the new partners on board for this project and the technology solution (the Chatbot), we can scale our model of enabling communities to fill data gaps to the entire country.
The scalable tech solution described here, which has been developed as part of the ASPiRe Program led by Societal Platform and Ashoka, will be anchored by our 200 Community Correspondents, who come from India's most marginalized communities (30% Dalit, 45% adivasi, 50% women). A selection of them, who are part of the VV Council, will be deeply involved in designing the ChatBot/platform roll out to make it effective.
- Strengthen disease surveillance, early warning predictive systems, and other data systems to detect, slow, or halt future disease outbreaks.
Our community-generated data system will be able to slow future disease outbreaks by facilitating last mile data collection from the remote villages about which it is very difficult to gather data. This and other articles make clear there is agreement that we don't know the extent of the crisis in the rural areas due to poor data.
In addition to the surveying chatbot, a conversational chatbot created with guidance from AI scientist Dr. Rohini Srihari will be used to combat vaccine disinformation in 200 WhatsApp Action groups VV already runs, and thousands more accessed through NGO partners.
- Scale: A sustainable enterprise working in several communities or countries that is looking to scale significantly, focusing on increased efficiency.
VV is a sustainable enterprise working in 200 districts of India, focused on community-generated data in multiple forms - video (8000+ videos on our YouTube channel); in-depth quantitative surveys (several done each year since 2015), 200 village-level WhatsApp Action groups, plus qualitative data on thousands of our local action campaigns (called ‘impact’ processes) which we have analyzed with our research partner, as well as hundreds of social media campaigns. Though the Chatbot and the data commons outlined here are new technologies for us, we have selected ‘scale’ because they are extending our existing work and will help us be more efficient in enabling communities to monitor government programs and organize for solutions. In the coming years, all of those efforts will be unified on our data platform, and the Chatbot -- perhaps the most scalable, efficient community media tool imaginable --will enable millions of citizens to provide actionable, organized data.

Founding Director

Executive Director - Ashoka Changemakers