For the March 2013 elections, Al Jazeera used Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology to create an additional interface to connect feature phones to the web.Cynara Vetch, the project manager of Al Jazeera Voices, explains; The Al Jazeera Voices system was built in collaboration with The World Wide Web Foundation and has been rolled out with various community partners. Subscribers on the Safaricom network in Kenya could access the service by calling a toll-free number. Kenyan Voices received 2066 calls, with the callers listening to 942 bulletins and leaving 609 reports. Al Jazeera worked with The National Youth Sector Alliance and Kibera TV to set up virtual newsrooms, where content was moderated locally and meta-data attached before being forwarded to the Al Jazeera newsrooms. A similar pilot project was conducted in Ghana during their December 2012 elections, where about 2000 people dialed into the service, with a 50% content consumption rate and a 20% engagement rate. “Both Kenya and Ghana have been conducted as pilots and not mass marketed services,” says Soud Hyder, Al Jazeera English’s new media analyst. “The aim is to evaluate the use of IVR in citizen reporting, as well as to distribute news and information to audiences we would not otherwise reach.” Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Kevin Kriedemann who is a Cape Town-based writer, publicist and online marketer specializing in the African creative industries. He’s also a publicist for Al Jazeera across Africa. You can visit his site at www.kevinlikes.com. Kevin got intouch with the TechPost after having been impressed by our Tech coverage of the Kenyan elections. If you haven’t, please check out “Why technology will play a key role in Kenya’s election“, “5 places to follow the Kenya elections online” and “How Kenyans used #TweetLikeAForeignJournalist in response to global coverage of elections“
