By Lely Djuhari, UNICEF Communication
Specialist
A 7.4
magnitude earthquake in Indonesia’s Central Sulawesi on 28 September unleashed
a tsunami. In the ensuing chaos, parents desperately held onto their children
but many were separated while trying to outrun three successive waves.
In the days
after the disaster, grieving families stuck posters on shop windows and lamp
posts, pleading passers-by for any information of their missing children. Once
electricity and telecommunication services were back on, many posted their
plight on social media channels.
“It’s a huge
challenge to get a comprehensive picture of how many children are missing.
There are more requests to reunite children and parents than information on
children found,” said Febraldi, the team leader from the Ministry of Social
Affairs deployed from Jakarta to coordinate protection efforts.
Febraldi, team leader from the Ministry of
Social Affairs (left) and I Made Sukawancita, UNICEF Technology for Development
Officer, in front of the joint secretariat and child center in Palu.
© UNICEF Indonesia/2018/ Arimacs Wilander
UNICEF is
supporting the Government of Indonesia to set up 12 posts in the affected areas
for people to seek and offer information on missing children.
These
locations are also being used as safe spaces for children to play. After
distributing 2,700 posters, and publishing social media posts with their
hotline numbers, the team received 117 tracing requests.
But every hour
and every day counts when a child is separated from their parent.
Enter an
innovative tool that speeds up family tracing and reunification. It’s called
Primero, an open source software platform that helps social workers manage
protection-related data.
What are the
advantages of using this platform?
“It’s faster,
more convenient and mobile. It has a wider reach. It’s quite simple and we can
tap information from Palu and other areas,” said I Made Suwancita, UNICEF
Indonesia’s Technology for Development Officer.
Fifty-six
social workers from the Ministry and aid groups have been trained to enter data
on Primero’s Indonesian-language web and mobile versions. They input the
missing child’s name, gender, date of birth, address as well as the parents’
basic information, and a short chronology of how they were separated.
“We met people
and scoured the postings of citizen groups such as Info Palu on Facebook,” said
Fadlun Badjerey a social worker. “My neck and back ached; my vision blurred
when we huddled over our mobiles and worked past midnight. But it’s worth it.”
Fadlun Badjerey, a social worker from the
Ministry of Social Affairs, puts up drawings made by children who
survived the tsunami and earthquake on 28 October. © UNICEF Indonesia/2018/ Arimacs Wilander
The last time
Indonesia experienced a major tsunami was on Boxing Day in 2004. At that time,
social workers and aid groups grappled with a bigger caseload, but only had pen
and paper to track all the data.
Primero has
been used in other countries during conflicts and in the aftermath of natural
disasters since 2013.
In Indonesia,
it was originally designed for child-protection related data management in
non-emergency contexts.
Other
UNICEF-initiated tech innovations in the country include U-report. Using Facebook
Messenger, WhatsApp and Short Messaging Service, the platform was launched in
2014 for polling, empowering 85,000 young people to be heard by policy makers
and providing them with access to reliable information.
In 2015,
UNICEF started to pilot RapidPro technology for health workers to use to
collect, monitor and disseminate health information such as childhood
immunization coverage, through text messaging.
In Central
Sulawesi, Made himself has been inundated with requests from Government partners
to adapt U-Report and RapidPro for use with social and health workers. It is
now easier to track how many children attend the child centres every afternoon
to play and receive psychosocial services. Field workers have also been trained
to enter data for school safety assessment.
Posts on
social media using U-Report, communicating directly to the people in the
affected areas and beyond, helped reunite seven children from their loved ones.
As for
Primero, 28 children (16 boys; 12 girls) have so far been reunified with family
and supported with case management through the platform.
These
innovations, led by UNICEF, are proving to be time-saving and efficient tools
that save and protect children.
