Dear Viamo Partners and Friends,
What a year this has been for us at Viamo! The past year was all about engaging with millions of hard-to-reach people with timely and useful information, products, and services on our platform. As we head into 2022 with renewed expectations and hope, I would like to share a few of the ways in which you helped shape our 2021.
COVID-19 dominated the headlines again with social distancing, vaccination efforts, and travel restrictions continuing the need for Viamo to disseminate essential updates. This year we shared information about vaccines from our partners including the World Health Organization through our 3-2-1 Platform. As variants popped up, we saw huge increases in traffic on our platform as people searched for reliable information. Our partners pushed the limits of our platform and products to meet people’s mobile-first needs from providing myth-busting information in Haiti to taking action against child marriages in Malawi.
With the ongoing pandemic at the top of the agenda, other potentially devastating issues received less attention from the mainstream media, but that didn’t mean our partners took their foot off the gas. Climate disasters and water shortages in Pakistan, a devastating earthquake in Haiti, a volcanic eruption in the Democratic Republic of Congo, led to food shortages, and health concerns. There was much work to do. We worked with the government of Pakistan to foster a youth-led initiative to resist climate change and liaised with Internews and Vodacom in the DRC to disseminate invaluable information. We’re proud to say that together, we made some incredible accomplishments.
A few of our important stats for 2021:
Our partners reached over 35 million people through our mobile-first products since the start of the year with over 275 million vital pieces of information dispatched in an easy-to-use format in 50 languages. That’s a lot of workers, teachers, mothers and farmers put on the path to better health and livelihoods through the industrious work of our amazing partners.
Worth Shouting About:
Here’s a brief round-up of some of the incredible things our partners accomplished last year:
- Important numbers in major countries. Our content partnerships led to more than 1 million people in Rwanda, Mali (which sent an astounding 70M key messages), DRC, and Madagascar visiting our platform in 2021. The multi-departmental partnerships with the United Nations in Pakistan helped over 21 million people hear vital COVID19 and vaccine-related messaging. Additionally, remote training projects and affiliations with key partners such as Johnson & Johnson and Rwanda’s Ministry of Health and USAID enabled us to reach 290,000 people in 27 countries.
- Massive vaccine-related data collection: Through our partnership with UNICEF globally, Viamo provided urgent data collection support to our partners including UNICEF, UNFPA, the WHO, UNECA, UNDP, and the World Bank for the COVID-19 response action plan. A massive data collection, enabled by this partnership, documented the behavioral changes of millions of unique people across 20 countries, including Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.
- Fighting Food Scarcity: Interactive audio gaming has proven to be a driver of social behavior change. Social activist organization Bangr Nooma in Burkina Faso used an innovative interactive radio-based media campaign initiated by our partner, NGO Radio Rurales Internationales (RRI), to spread their message with impressive results. Using our 3-2-1 platform they increased their fight against food scarcity and other pressing issues to broadcast 24-7. Over the course of six months, 18,000 unique listeners listened to nearly 289,000 key messages from the “Bangr-nooma” audio game on the 3-2-1 platform.
- Extreme Weather Readiness: Mercy Corps, our partner in Haiti, utilized a USAID grant to help spread the word via mobile for emergency weather response in urban and rural areas. CHANTER (Communities in Haiti Access New Technologies for Early Warning/Response) was launched immediately preceding Haiti’s devastating earthquake and was able to provide reliable information to people who needed food, shelter, and security. The calls were stylized as a radio drama in 18 parts with tremendous results reaching over 23,000 people.
- Combating Domestic Violence via Mobile: Our partner Nepal Telecom, started a hotline service via the 3-2-1 Platform to inform listeners about COVID-19 safety protocols, health, agriculture, weather, child education, and disaster management. To mark 16 Days of Activism against gender-based violence it used poignant skits to engage rural residents about the dangers of the practice and registered thousands of women calling daily.
- Fighting child marriages: UNICEF Malawi took on the fight to end child marriages in Malawi with a faith-based consortium of faith leaders united in taking on an issue rife within lower socio-economic elements of society. UNICEF Malawi aims to serve as self-proclaimed ‘champions’ in its quest to end the practice of child marriages. In total over 600 complete training interviews were completed via our 3-2-1 Platform, with religious leaders, keen on implementing the mission.
Looking forward to 2022
We stay committed in our efforts to connect 3 billion of the hardest to reach people on the planet. Pivotal to achieving this is the expansion of our 3-2-1 Platform while growing our range of products to expand their reach. In 2021, we launched 3-2-1 in Haiti bringing our total countries to 18.
With this goal in mind, we were delighted to onboard 125 new recruits in 13 new countries in 2021. Our team of nearly 300 is more equipped in meeting the needs of our global partners.
- Demand Generation: This matches our users with our partners to provide hyper-relevant services through personalization and user segmentation via our 3-2-1 platform.
- Our remote training app is coming!: The goal is to continue building upon the massive success of our breakout remote training product and introduce the best practices we have developed over the past year to help ensure further project success.
- Partner dashboard solutions: Easy-to-use, interactive product dashboards that provide insights for monitoring and evaluating your projects
In 2021 we closed our Series A funding round led by the Global Innovation Fund, an impact-first investment fund. Their investment in Viamo makes the goal of reaching millions of disconnected people attainable.
Thank you, once again, for being part of our movement. Together, we’ve seen tremendous progress in 2021 which we hope to continue in 2022, keeping us on track to reach 100 million monthly active users by 2026.
Happy New Year!
CEO, Viamo
