LRI: automating rural outreach, all the way to the most isolated communities

Restoring forests and supporting agriculture in Lebanon depends on something technology cannot manufacture: trust. The Lebanon Reforestation Initiative works with scattered rural communities, often in hard-to-reach areas, and its effectiveness rests on constant dialogue with thousands of farmers. Seven projects running in parallel, a deliberately lean team, contacts spread across the whole country: the organisation needed a channel that would connect it to its beneficiaries without adding weight to its structure.

When every training began with 250 phone calls

As it grew, LRI watched its traditional methods test the limits of its teams. Organising an agricultural training session meant the same ritual every time: an officer had to call each farmer, around 250 people on each occasion, to pass on the information, collect registrations and confirm attendance. Entire days swallowed by a repetitive task, at the expense of the substantive work.

Accessibility was a second problem. Conventional channels did not account for people with reading difficulties. And while LRI did run a complaints mechanism by hotline and email, those options were generally introduced only in face-to-face training, which limited their use for remote communities and for the needs that arise between two meetings. What was required was a permanent digital point of contact that would democratise access to reporting and simplify the distribution of resources.

Broadcasting instead of calling

By folding the SOLIS bot into its daily workflows, LRI transformed how it communicates. Rather than dialling hundreds of numbers, teams now send event invitations and notifications by broadcast. To keep things clear, these messages combine simple text with images, and beneficiaries register straight away through an automated form, cutting the administrative burden accordingly.

Sending one broadcast instead of 250 individual calls represents 12 to 21 staff-hours saved per event, or one and a half to two and a half working days of a field officer's time recovered at every training or distribution.

One channel, many uses

Far from limiting itself to invitations, LRI turned the bot into a genuine information hub. The organisation uses it to:

• share soil test results directly with the farmers concerned, deep into hard-to-reach areas,
• broadcast emergency information and key messages through a dedicated information center activated during crises,
• deliver training materials, PDF maps and reference documents, straight to people's phones,
• gather participant consent at the very start of a project.

So that no one is left behind, LRI puts the voice feature to work for people who read with difficulty, and has built a video tutorial into the content tree to guide newcomers. Internally, the same bot serves as a field repository: links, administrative documents and guidelines, kept in a single thread available anywhere, rather than scattered across phone notes.

The numbers

Since launching, between March 2025 and May 2026, LRI's deployment has logged 5,180 unique users and processed 12,199 interactions, including 6,829 information messages, 5,138 broadcasts and 232 surveys. For a team of twenty to forty permanent staff running seven concurrent projects, those volumes represent thousands of manual touchpoints removed, and just as much time handed back to what really matters: the relationship with the communities.