CARE Lebanon: 70,000 people reached, fifty euros of staff time saved for every euro spent
In a crisis, clear communication is not a nicety. It is a form of aid in its own right, as concrete as cash or food. Our partners at CARE Lebanon proved it at scale. Delivering assistance is only half the job. The other half is managing the flow of information, complaints and feedback from entire communities that are often scattered and hard to reach. That is exactly where the SOLIS bot found its place.
A WhatsApp account that could no longer keep up
Before adopting the bot, CARE Lebanon relied on a standard WhatsApp Business account with a handful of automated replies. It held together until the scale of operations outgrew it. There was no way to track the volume of incoming messages, follow a complaint from start to finish, or broadcast an announcement to thousands of people while keeping a reliable record. The team spent more time working around the tool's limits than doing its actual job.
In June 2024, the accountability team within the MEAL department adopted the SOLIS bot. In under two years it spread across all twelve of the organisation's active projects and became an institutional habit: it is now introduced to every new hire during onboarding.
The trial by fire
The real value of a communication channel shows when everything else closes down. For CARE, that moment came during the escalation of hostilities between September and November 2024. As physical access to communities grew dangerous, the bot stayed open: information on one side, a complaints entry point on the other, available at any hour.
In its July 2025 "Accountability in Action" study, CARE put it plainly: the chatbot, particularly popular among younger users and those with limited airtime credit, processed over 7,000 entries during the emergency response. Monthly traffic tracked the arc of the crisis, peaking at 9,044 users in July 2025 during a wave of targeted strikes, then again at 11,616 in May 2026, when field access was most constrained. When teams can no longer travel, beneficiaries still hold a number that answers.
An everyday tool, not just an emergency one
Reducing the bot to a crisis device would miss the point. Day to day, CARE uses it across its full portfolio: directing people to available services, sharing key messages on the prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse, organising food and cash distributions, running rapid needs assessments and post-distribution monitoring. Because the surveys are short and completed inside the conversation itself, they reach an average response rate of 70 percent, an exceptional figure for remote data collection.
The bot also serves the teams themselves. In the field, a dedicated module lets staff refer an urgent case in seconds, without waiting to get back to the office.
The maths that change the picture
The numbers tell the rest. Over ten months, the bot logged 26,484 unique users, processed more than 278,000 information messages, sent close to 9,000 broadcasts and gathered 7,924 surveys. By automating 70 percent of routine questions, it freed the teams for the complex protection cases, the ones that demand a human presence.
The financial translation is stark: roughly €540,000 in staff-time value generated over the period, a value-to-cost ratio of about 50 to 1. Every euro invested in the bot returned close to fifty euros of team time that would otherwise have gone into calls and field visits. For thirty to sixty minutes of daily management, the accountability team gained the equivalent of fourteen positions dedicated to information sharing. Per person, the service works out at around €0.15 per beneficiary reached.
One last indicator, quieter than the others, may say the most: 97 percent of conversations are started spontaneously by beneficiaries, with no broadcast prompting them. It is the highest organic share anywhere in the SOLIS network. In other words, people come back to the bot on their own, because it is useful to them. No statistic is worth quite as much as that one.