Frequently asked questions

A turnkey humanitarian chatbot on WhatsApp, the messaging app the people we serve already use every day. It brings together five functions: a 24/7 information center, mass message broadcasting, remote surveys and forms, a confidential complaints mechanism, and an early-warning system. Everything is managed from a simple web platform, with no technical skills required.

The SOLIS bot is built and operated by Solidarités International, a French humanitarian NGO working in major crises for over 40 years. It is the first solution of its kind offered turnkey by an international NGO. First launched in Lebanon in 2020, it is now used by CARE, Terre des Hommes, Nabad for Development and the Lebanon Reforestation Initiative.

CARE Lebanon started exactly there, and moved to the SOLIS bot when volume outgrew it: a WhatsApp Business account cannot track thousands of conversations, broadcast personalised messages at scale, run structured surveys, or trace complaints. The SOLIS bot centralises all of that, with a dashboard, exports and a complete history.

Yes. Beneficiaries use the service free of charge, around the clock, from their own phone. No download, no account, no fees.

That is one of the tool's core reasons for existing. The voice module lets people ask their question aloud and receive a spoken answer. Critical content is recorded by local team members, in the community's own languages, Fulfulde in Cameroon, Haitian Creole in Haiti. 84% of beneficiaries find the bot more convenient than traditional hotlines.

WhatsApp requires a smartphone, but the SMS fallback works on basic phones, and PDF documents (illustrated guides, evacuation maps) can be downloaded and read offline. The bot adapts to the devices people actually have.

Five things: (1) answer questions 24/7 through the information center, (2) alert thousands of people in seconds with personalised broadcasts, (3) run surveys (PDMs, assessments) that export to Excel, (4) receive complaints and assistance requests confidentially and traceably, (5) detect weak signals, consultation spikes, converging reports, and notify your teams before the crisis breaks.

All of them. Content is written by your teams in your beneficiaries' languages, text-to-speech (Google Cloud TTS) covers every language, and locally recorded voice notes complement the text. Current deployments run in Arabic, French, English, Ukrainian, Haitian Creole and Fulfulde, among others.

Never. The SOLIS bot runs on a deterministic rule engine: every message a beneficiary receives was written and approved by your teams. Nothing is improvised by a machine, a matter of accountability, and incidentally a measurable environmental advantage over LLM-based chatbots.

Yes, that is the model proving itself in Lebanon, where CARE, Nabad, LRI, Terre des Hommes and SI each run their own bot: dedicated number, tailored content, full autonomy, shared infrastructure and costs. The flat licence structure creates strong economies of scale: doubling your beneficiaries halves the cost per person.

Eight deployments across four countries: five in Lebanon (CARE, LRI, TDH, Nabad, SI Lebanon, the main field since 2020) and three pilots (SI Ukraine, SI Cameroon, SI Haiti). It can be deployed anywhere beneficiaries have a phone and network coverage.

A first working version in two weeks, through four two-hour workshops: scoping, content, technical setup, testing. In an emergency, the bot can be live the same day, one SI team in Lebanon was trained in an hour and collected 700 survey responses within 48 hours. A full pilot with evaluation runs three months.

Usage costs are very low: €0.02 per WhatsApp broadcast message, under €0.20 per survey response, 10 to 50 times cheaper than field collection. On top sits a flat annual licence, which organisations can share. Over ten months in Lebanon, every euro invested returned the equivalent of 11 to 50 euros of staff time. Contact us for a quote suited to your mission.

Data protection is built in from the scoping stage: minimisation (collect only what is strictly necessary), explicit consent, exclusion of sensitive data, medical, ethnic, political, under the "do no harm" principle, surveys anonymous by default in high-risk contexts, and a default phone-number retention policy of two months. Every deployment starts with a risk analysis validated by the protection focal point.

Write to solisbot@solidarites.org: our team will answer your questions, arrange a demonstration and support you from scoping to launch. If your situation is urgent, say so, emergency onboarding takes a matter of hours.