AIDA Chatbot Builder

People are increasingly engaging with chatbots via messenger apps such as Facebook and and Telegram that are rising in popularity as mobile data plans and Wifi become more prevalent. The impact opportunity and need to engage vulnerable populations on food security issues sparked a project collaboration between the World Food Programme (WFP) and InSTEDD with support from the Cisco Foundation, are working together to create “Foodbot”, a chatbot that’s goal is to collect and share information relating to food security.

In the same way a chatbot can successfully give personalized information on makeup choices to a shopper, the technology has the potential to be an innovative tool for development and humanitarian organizations to better communicate with their constituencies. The ability to deploy a scaled outreach campaign while not heavily burdening staff with regards to time and training has the potential to be one invaluable use of chatbots to development organizations with and without an ICT focus.