Inspiration
Families in rural and impoverished areas with limited access to technology and information, who are vulnerable to recruiting schemes promising jobs for the daughter in the city.
What it does
Enables families to text a string to an SMS number to report daughter getting recruited. The bot will automatically send periodic and short SMS surveys where parents can report whether they are in contact with their daughter and other potentially identifiable information.
This provides a simple low-tech interface that helps track incidents of trafficking. The collected data can be later use to create an SMS-based recruiter verification system.
How to built
The initial version uses Heroku + Posgress + Twilio to ping families periodically and a database that tallies the responses. On top, some simple web app that visualizes the information collected.
Challenges
How to raise awareness of the service in rural areas. Can be bootstrapped by legacy campaigns like radio or word of mouth until getting critical mass.
What we learned
Is very challenging finding the right value-proposition/positioning of the product.
What's next for ReportBot
The SMS service is extensible. For instance, it can have an option to give families a directory of related services in their area.
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