Text Messaging Featured Article

Ureport, a free SMS-based reporting tool, was recently launched to help Ugandan youth reach out to their government and community leaders through their cell phones.

IBM (News - Alert) and the U.S. Fund for UNICEF partnered with UNICEF Uganda to promote and enhance U-report usage, which so far has enabled more than 240,000 Ugandans to send out text messages so that their views on topics such as health, education and gender-based violence can be heard.

The increasing usage of U-report means the existing system was unable to handle the huge volume of data and had trouble differentiating between urgent messages and common messages. So UNICEF Uganda and IBM Research deployed A-Class, a text classification system, to sort out the message content and more quickly and accurately analyze the data.

Sharad Sapra, a representative of UNICEF Uganda, commented, “This project has the potential to change the lives of young people in Uganda simply by giving them a platform to communicate and be heard. Today we’ve created a richer U-report that makes sense of streams of data in real-time. This technology helps us understand the real impact of policies and development programs, the pulse of the nation at any given time and it even provides an early warning system on disease outbreaks or where we need to focus relief work. We are working toward removing the guesswork out of knowing where to put resources in areas where they are most needed.”

IBM asserted that its smarter analytics methodology helps users extract insights from their enterprise data and all the big data that is continuously flowing in from a variety of new sources. They can build a solid foundation of strategic analytics products and services to take advantage of all of their data sources, including structured and unstructured data.

A-Class system will be instrumental in automating the classification of messages generated by the U-report tool. For example, a disease outbreak is being reported in a small village and even though only a few number of messages are being sent out about it, the A-Class system can sort out those messages and alert the authorities to taking suitable actions to contain the outbreak.

Based on the success of the U-report program in Uganda, UNICEF has launched it in Zambia, Burundi and South Sudan.