RapidPro USSD Channel

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is an agency of the United Nations mandated to advocate for the protection of children’s rights, to help meet their basic needs and to expand their opportunities to reach their full potential. Guided by the Convention on the Rights of the Child UNICEF strives to establish children’s rights as international standards of behaviour towards children. UNICEF’s role is to mobilise political will and material resources to help countries ensure a “first call for children”. UNICEF is committed to ensuring special protection for the most disadvantaged children.

UNICEF carries out its work through its headquarters in New York, 8 regional offices and 125 country offices world-wide. UNICEF also has a research centre in Florence, a supply operation based in Copenhagen and offices in Tokyo and Brussels. UNICEF’s 37 committees raise funds and spread awareness about the organisations mission and work.

RapidPro is an open-source communication platform that was launched by UNICEF in September 2014 to address a variety of needs the organization had for using mobile services. RapidPro was created in collaboration between UNICEF and Nyaruka, a Rwandan software firm. It is built on Nyaruka ́s experience in developing mobile-based solutions. RapidPro has been developed and branded for UNICEF to host and build its own services and applications internally and together with its partners.

At its core, RapidPro allows for the dynamic management of data collection, complex workflows, and group coordination using mobile phones. Once information is collected, RapidPro can present information on the internet in an interactive dashboard / UI as soon as it is received, empowering officials and community members alike with a real-time ‘pulse’ and feedback loops for the issues that matter most to them. Criticality of realtime health information cannot be overemphasised in the health sector.

For UNICEF, RapidPro is allowing programme managers to immediately set-up and customize the platform according to the specific needs and requirements of their program. With RapidPro, programme managers can build their own workflows via an easy-to-use web-based interface. With this same functionality, users can create polls and campaigns on an administrative dashboard and prepare customizable frontend websites for aggregated data reports and mapping of poll results without in- depth programming knowledge.

RapidPro also extends the channels of communication from what was once just SMS, IVR to Facebook/WhatsApp, Telegram and others, with more channels to be built out based on the needs of organizations. As RapidPro evolves at the global level, country-level deployments will continue to upgrade – ensuring that new feature development such as this multi-channel integration are available to all users of the system. More about RapidPro can be learned at https://rapidpro.io/

USSD

Although USSD was implemented as one of the supported channels in RapidPro-core, due to the long- term maintenance burden of the USSD code base compared to the currently actualized demand/implementation by programmes, support for USSD was dropped from RapidPro-core.

Starting from RapidPro v5, internal channel support is only available for SMS, IVR, and HTTP-based channels. To continue support for session-based text message interactions, UNICEF is looking to implement USSD support as an external channel leveraging RapidPro’s generic channel API. This comes in response to UNICEF country offices looking for ways to interface with mobile end users via non-smartphone, non-internet, and session-based interactions.

Aside from incorporating interoperability with technologies that manage USSD-based message transports, the vendor will implement a USSD session management service capable of providing tools and services for monitoring and managing individual USSD sessions of users interacting with generic RapidPro SMS/text flows.