Haiti: when no field officer can get in, the bot remains
In some neighbourhoods of Port-au-Prince, our teams have been unable to travel for months. Access roads are controlled by armed groups, the risks to staff are too high, and entire populations find themselves, on paper, beyond the reach of aid. These areas have not disappeared. Nor have the families living in them. What has disappeared is our ability to reach them in person.
One thread remains, though. Almost every one of these households owns a phone, and that phone has WhatsApp. It is on this observation that Solidarités International is launching its SOLIS bot pilot in Haiti. Where access is cut off, the bot sometimes becomes the only humanitarian channel still active. The deployment is just beginning and impact figures will come with time, but the need is already documented, and the system is built around three demands at once: to stay useful, to stay discreet, and to stay up to date.
Content shaped by the security context
An information center deployed in an environment of armed violence cannot look like one built for a development programme. Our teams designed the content around four priority needs, identified before access closed: where to find water and food, which health facilities remain open, how to report an emergency, and what safety information to know before moving around.
Discretion here is a matter of safety, not a preference. In some neighbourhoods, receiving a message identified as coming from an NGO can expose the person who receives it. The first message is therefore deliberately neutral, and every area is risk-assessed before any deployment.
Content built for zero prerequisites
We start from the assumption that no prior training has taken place. Each section has to make sense on its own. The content exists as short texts in Haitian Creole and as sixty-second voice notes recorded by Haitian members of the team. That choice is not cosmetic: a familiar, recognisable voice, in the accent of the region, is a voice people listen to all the way through. Alongside sit PDF documents, illustrated cyclone guides and evacuation maps, which stay available on the phone even without a connection, a decisive point in a country where the network is intermittent.
A link maintained from a distance
The main challenge of an information center in an unreachable area is keeping it current. Health facilities close, water points move, and outdated information can turn dangerous. To address this, the team relies on a network of trusted relays, identified before access closed, contacted every week to confirm that the published information still holds.
The reporting protocol follows one unbending rule: never promise what you cannot deliver. Every message gets an immediate acknowledgement and a response within two hours. When an intervention is impossible, we say so plainly, and we point people towards the local resources still available. "We cannot come right now, but here is what we can do" is worth more than a false reassurance that would destroy trust.
Because trust is exactly what is at stake. For the people who remain in these areas, being able to send a message and receive an answer changes something fundamental: they are no longer invisible.