The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated rapid top-down dissemination of reliable and actionable information. This presents unique challenges in engaging low-literate communities that live in poverty and lack access to the Internet. We describe the design and deployment of a voice-based social media platform, accessible over simple phones, for actively engaging such communities in Pakistan with reliable COVID information. We developed three strategies to overcome users’ hesitation, mistrust, and skepticism in engaging with COVID content. Users were: (1) encouraged to listen to reliable COVID advisory, (2) incentivized to share authentic content with others, and (3) prompted to critically think about COVID-related information behaviors. Using a mixed-methods evaluation, we show that users approached with all three strategies had a significantly higher engagement with COVID content compared to others. We discuss how new designs of social media can enable users to engage with and propagate authentic information.

Information and Communication Technology interventions have the potential to improve outcomes in health and other development sectors in low-income settings. Large-scale impact, however, remains the central challenge for the HCI4D community as significant and diverse resources are typically required to scale such interventions beyond the pilot stage. In contrast, voice-based entertainment services accessible over simple phones, designed for similarly low-income, low-literate populations manage to scale 'virally' to tens of thousands of users with little to no advertising cost. Our study compares the outcomes of using voice-based entertainment to spread a maternal-health hotline against conventional advertisement channels including paper flyers, posters, radio, TV, social media and robocalls. Through an 11-week deployment in Pakistan where the hotline reached 21,770 users over 32,625 calls, we find that the entertainment service outperformed other channels on all popular user acquisition metrics, with the exception of robocalls, which lead in terms of spread.

This paper highlights some of the difficulties experienced by volunteers and members of the general public when coordinating a response to an emergency in Pakistan, and discusses a participatory approach to investigating the requirements of an online emergency response platform that links volunteers with donors. The approach builds upon the use of a prototype platform in a simulated emergency situation with real users to test assumptions and learn about the design requirements for such a platform. The paper details the design process and the features of the prototype, and the feedback it received from users.