MWash Bot: Shifting User Interaction

The future of Bots will definitely kill websites and mobile apps. This is what Chatbots Magazine wrote in November 2016.

I was introduced to bots when working for WAYO, a company that utilizes mobile technology to draw insights on customer feedback and engagement on products and services that companies and organizations provide. The bots on Telegram proved to be very useful to customers especially when providing interactive information to users. Some users even presumed they weren’t interacting with a machine but rather another human user:

MWash Bot seeks to provide such interaction to the 4.6% of internet users in Sierra Leone. You might be shocked by the number and probably asking yourself, ‘What about the rest of the 95.3% ?’ Plans are underway to create more mediums for users to interact with the application including providing the application as an offline package.

One of the initial plans was to utilize SMS and USSD services in Sierra Leone, but factors such as monthly maintenance cost and end user cost have been taken into consideration. This however does not stand in the way of utilizing the hundreds of other methods to give users what they want.

As such, Telegram Bots is not the only bot medium being integrated to the application. Other bot instant messengers such as Facebook Messenger Bots will be created. Feel free to access the bot via Telegram App by searching ‘@MwashBot’ or accessing via browser https://web.telegram.org/#/im?p=@MWashBot

The d|Bootcamp in Sierra Leone was based on a Code for Africa model first pioneered in Kenya in 2012 that has since been adopted across the world, with 32 bootcamps hosted in 27 countries. The Freetown event follows Code for Africa’s earlier pioneering work in Sierra Leone, where it partnered with theWorld Bank to help kickstart data scraperthons during a 6-week Open Data Festival 2016 in March 2016. You can read about the scraperthons here.

Code for Africa (CfAfrica) is the continent’s largest independent open data and civic technology initiative. We seek to build digital democracies that give citizens timely and unfettered access to actionable information that empowers them to make informed decisions and that strengthens civic engagement for improved public governance and accountability.

CfAfrica operates as a federation of autonomous country-based digital innovation organisations that support ‘citizen labs’ in nine countries and major projects in a further 15 countries. There are CfAfrica affiliate labs in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda.

CfAfrica runs Africa’s OpenGov Fellowships and also embeds Innovation Fellows into newsrooms and social justice organisations to help liberate data of public interest, or to build tools that help empower citizens.

In addition to fellowships and citizen labs, CfAfrica runs the $1 million per year#innovateAFRICA fund plus the $500,000/year #impactAFRICA fund and the $500,000/year Sandbox Fund which all award seed grants to civic pioneers for experiments with everything from camera drones and environmental sensors, to encryption for whistleblowers and data-driven semantic analysis tools for investigative watchdogs.

CfAfrica also curates continental resources such as the africanSPENDINGportal of budget transparency resources, the openAFRICAdata portal, thesourceAFRICA document repository, and the connectedAFRICAtransparency toolkit for tracking the often hidden social networks and economic interests in politics.

CfAfrica is furthermore custodian of the continental 30,000 strongHacks/Hackers community, and incubates the continent’s largest investigative journalism initiative, the African Network of Centers for Investigating Reporting (which spearheaded the #PanamaPapers investigations on the continent).