Case Study: IFRC, Voila and Public/Private Telecoms Sector Partnerships

In Zimbabwe, a local NGO – the Humanitarian Information Facilitation Centre (HIFC) – piloted an
electronic national survey on access to information, using questionnaires on smart phones rather than traditional paper forms. The pilot project was supported by International Media Support and had two main objectives:
1. To test the efficiency of the survey tool and the open-sourced Nokia Data Gathering (NDG) software.
2. To determine the population’s sources of information in order to improve government’s and
humanitarian organisations’ communication strategies.
This paper desribes the implementation process and the lessons learned from it.