WhatsApp Automations

Most organizations that run field operations have learned to communicate with their field teams. They send dispatch instructions. They receive delivery confirmations. They track location and status through some combination of messages, calls, and spreadsheet updates. That part, however imperfectly, tends to work.

An early warning system (EWS) that successfully alerts a dispatch team but fails to reach the community at risk has not completed its job. In disaster risk reduction (DRR) practice, the difference between a warning sent and a warning received, understood, and acted upon is often where lives are lost.

When a satellite detects a fire burning in a remote conservation reserve, the detection itself is not the hard part. The hard part is what happens next: getting the right message to the right people, across unreliable networks, in under sixty seconds, so that a field team can respond before the situation escalates.