Gindegi Goron: reaching Rohingya and host community caregivers through IVR, phone-based and blended modalities

• In Event: Equity through Innovation: Closing the Gaps Using Phone-based Interventions to Reach Caregivers–Evidence from Bangladesh, Palestine, and Northern Ghana.

Proposal

With a history of persecution beginning in the early 1990s, the latest and most severe series of violence has driven a total 884,000 Rohingya people into exile and statelessness since 2012. Many of the displaced Rohingya now reside in 34 highly congested refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar on the coast of Bangladesh. In an area vulnerable to natural disasters and where malnutrition was already a threat to young children, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a third crisis on top of displacement and natural disasters. Colleagues from the icddr,b had vast experience with the use of Reach Up and Learn in other parts of the country successfully. In response to COVID-19 risk factors and lockdowns, the IRC and icddr,b designed a holistic remote intervention that uses phone calls and interactive voice response (IVR) messages to promote nurturing care, focusing particularly on health, nutrition, caregiver wellbeing, and early learning opportunities. The pre-post survey results from the 4-month initial pilot ran for 434 caregivers showed that more caregivers (N= 187) reported engaging in play and reading with their children at the endline compared with baseline. After this initial pilot, the team underwent a prototyping phase to make improvements to the intervention based on learnings from the pilot. This included refining the IVR platform, customizing content to children’s age by month, and incorporating home visits given that lock-downs had been lifted and mobile phone penetration was still not universal. With these improvements, the program scaled to reach 2,400 households through its re-designed blended intervention. To monitor improvement and inform facilitator coaching, the team employed a Supervision and Monitoring Checklist to assess the quality of facilitated phone calls. Data shows that key areas such as friendliness of the facilitator were rated highly, while details such as recapping what was discussed on the call scored lower. Cost data from pilot phase compared with the scale-up phase, promising monitoring and evaluation survey results and phone call monitoring data will be analyzed to explore key lessons for continued programming and the scaling opportunities opened up by remote and blended modalities.

Authors

• Ahsan Mahmud, International Rescue Committee

• Katelin Wilton, International Rescue Committee