The Indigo Trust just published our recent account detailing the wild and wooly journey we have taken to develop our newest offering, Open Question. This journey was generously sponsored by The Indigo Trust, and we got there thanks to our incredible and dedicated programming team, who went through incredible challenges to get us to the finish line.

Open Question – Persevering Through Technical White Water Rapids

By Scott Fairbanks and Rose Shuman – Question Box

Our organization, Question Box, spent years creating and running local hotlines in rural, developing world communities. In 2010, the Question Box team agreed upon a major shift in direction. To achieve a real shift in development practice we needed move away from being implementers, and towards being a tool-provider. That way, we could spread and scale the promise of low-cost hotlines by taking what we had learned and creating a way for NGOs to build and manage their own hotlines.

Open Question, our software concept, was a keystone to building a hotline toolkit. Open Question is a software program that helps community organizations record data from incoming hotline calls, efficiently search for answers, and track call times, caller demographics, and answers to survey questions. The spec demanded a simple desktop interface that could work on offline, outdated computers in developing countries. Meaning, it had to be compatible with the likes of a Pentium II PC with 128 MB of RAM running Windows XP.

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From Hayley, Open Mind – Question Box intern over the summer from Stanford.

Hi, I’m Hayley!

My interest in Open Mind started last fall when I read an article about Question Box in the newspaper. I had just returned from a summer spent teaching in a rural school in Papua New Guinea and I was brainstorming ways to continue helping my students. The idea of a live, local-language hotline struck me as genius. My students had few textbooks, and no additional resources such as libraries, computers, or educated adults. But they did have cell phones.

This summer I’ve been multitasking. During the day I’m interning at the Open Mind office in LA. I’ve spent most of my time working on the how-to-create-you-own-hotline manual that is designed for community organizations in the developing world. The manual will eventually be part of an online toolkit to guide organizations starting their own Question Box-style hotlines. I’ve also had the chance to learn a bit about grant writing and the daily operation of Open Mind. Simultaneously, I’m attempting to start a hotline for my old students in Papua New Guinea. I’m working with students at Divine Word University, one of the most prestigious universities in the country, to set up a call center where the university students will answer primary school students’ questions about everything from education to health to career paths.

The hotline for dairy farmers in Thajavur, India is operational! Open Mind—Question Box has been working with Arohana Dairy Private Limited to create a hotline which will contribute to the organization’s goal of creating highly productive dairy clusters by empowering and involving dairy farmers. The hotline’s focus is on questions related to animal husbandry.

So far, phones have been installed at milk collection centers in four of the ten villages Arohana is working in. Dairy farmers can use those phones to get a direct connection to Tamil Nadu Veterinary and the Animal Sciences University where experts are available to answer their questions. The hotline Operators will use the opportunity to collect information about the dairy farmers and their questions. Arohana will analyze the resulting data to find trends in the way the dairy farmers think, common misconceptions they may have, and how they get their information. Hopefully this analysis will allow Arohana to refine its programs and initiatives to better help the local dairy farmers. Meanwhile, the self-sustaining hotline service, which uses coin-operated phones, will be directly and immediately helping the diary farmers.

Although this is a reenactment, this was an actual question that was asked a few weeks ago. The caller wanted to know if the pyramids had been damaged or moved.

Why types of questions have we received lately at Question Box?

• How can one control Avocado fruits from getting rotten and falling off?
• Which criteria can a farmer use to select eggs which can hatch only cocks
• An s.6 student wants to invest but he has only 100.000/=, how can u help him invest in something good without getting a loan?
• how can one control the moto weed which destroys crops?
• how long does it take for banana suckers to dry without being affected by diseases?
• the man’s pig has wounds on its ears what should he use to treat it ?

Currently our service is being used as part of an Agricultural study with our partners at the Grameen and the Gates Foundations. So questions like the ones about livestock and farming are expected. However, it’s always interesting for us when we get questions that don’t fall into those categories. For instance, the question above about investment is particularly interesting to Question Box.

Why?

Because there are a lack of viable financial solutions and related education solutions for rural populations. Are there other students in this area that are interested in saving/investing? If not, can this particular student be motivated in some way to help us serve his community? Are there programs in place that can even facilitate this type of investment? 100.000 Ugandan Shillings is about fifty dollars and half to a third of the cost of average school fees here which is actually a lot of money in this particular region.

In both Uganda and India, the Question Box service receives a lot of health related questions. We are looking for medical professionals who are qualified to answer questions from the rural developing world. Here’s a sample of recent unanswered medical queries from Uganda:

Can a person get swine fever / flu when he eats pork?

What is the best drug for candida?

I have chronic head ache and I can’t even carry anything on my head and I get thirsty all the time?

The man developed high blood pressure and later a wound on his leg and its not curing yet he has been at Mulago Hospital but no change what should he do?

What are the dangerous signs of pregnancy in women?

Why do some women have deep voices like men?

If you’re interested in helping out, please contact us !