An alert system for ACF France

Description

CartONG built an Emergency Alert System to provide a quick and generic picture of the state of an emergency in countries of intervention, allowing ACF to make quick and informed decisions and help determine the most appropriate response model.

From a technical perspective, the objective was to use tools that were already familiar to the users, and that wouldn’t represent significant costs in terms of deployment, use, and maintenance. The system combined an Enketo form, a database, and an automatic report to assess the magnitude of an emergency according to pre-defined criteria: the vulnerability of the affected areas, and the country-office preparedness for emergency response. 

The Enketo form allowed Country Offices to input data about the emergency easily, thus reducing the workload burden during an emergency context. The use of the form enabled scoring to be calculated automatically based on the responses to the form, thus avoiding the need for data processing. This ensured both the efficiency of the system and limited human involvement in the processing of a potentially large volume of information: all the data used by the model were therefore taken from the form, with no need for intermediate calculations. 

Once the form was completed, a reporting template would be auto-populated with the data downloaded from the Kobo Server. The report included the recommendation based on the score obtained, with a space for qualitative feedback. This report could then be shared with the Country Offices as well as used for internal analysis and planning for next-steps in the emergency response. 

The system allowed ACF to better structure the emergency response decision-making process, normalizing and standardizing certain parameters in order to “objectively” pre-define the potential positioning of the emergency response.