The World Food Programme’s mobile Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping (mVAM) project uses mobile surveys to make real-time assessments of food insecurity possible in conflict zones. This is what the innovation process looked like for the mVAM team.

mVAM was developed because WFP were increasingly being asked to work in insecure and conflict settings where access to refugee camps was not always possible or safe. In DRC, for example, their teams lacked regular and safe access to camps in Goma due to fighting along access routes. When they did get access they noticed that many people had mobile phones, which might enable remote needs assessment (Recognition).

The mVAM team carried out extensive research on existing solutions, as well as on the contextual challenges and possibilities of remotely surveying internally displaced people (IDPs). They knew that the World Bank had piloted remote phone surveys and had heard of Von Engelhart’s ‘Listening to Dar’ initiative. mVAM successfully brought in experts from multiple fields to inform their process of ideation and scoping of possibilities, and made active use of blogs and social media to raise awareness of their work and make new connections (Search).

The team experimented with voice call surveys, computer assisted telephone interviews (CAIT), SMS text surveys, and with automated interactive voice response (IVR) surveys, initially on colleagues and friends. They tested hundreds of different of wordings to increase clarity and concision to reduce surveys to a maximum of ten minutes (Invention).

In the pilot phase mVAM had to adapt to changing contextual and user demands. The Ebola crisis created a stark need for remote surveys as it was impossible to conduct face-to-face surveys. Survey respondents generated an unanticipated demand for an interactive service. Their helpline for use in Niger underwent a two-year testing process, during which mVAM partnered with Nielsen and Tulane University on methodology and evaluation (Pilot).

mVAM was able to benefit from the scale and reach of the WFP operations worldwide – providing an internal route to scale through replication in other WFP programmes in other countries. To help enable scale, mVAM also produced a suite of guidelines and tutorials including an online course. Their work has been documented in journal articles, sector reports, and media articles, all of which are logged and available from a project resource portal. mVAM is now used in more than 40 countries to conduct in excess of 20,000 surveys per month every month, with a grand total of 481,113 completed surveys to date (Scale).