Focus area
Public Health
We help health teams understand what people are asking, fearing and believing during outbreaks and emergencies, and act on it while it still matters.
CHALLENGES
In an outbreak, communities receive information from health workers, neighbours, the media and social platforms at the same time, and some of it is false or misleading. Behind most rumours, whether about a vaccine or the origin of a disease, there is a question nobody has answered. What communities ask reaches health teams through hotlines, field reports, community feedback, news and social media, each showing only part of the picture, and when this is consolidated by hand, concerns have usually moved on before a response is ready.
Why it matters
What people hear shapes whether they seek care, accept a vaccine, follow health guidance and trust the services in charge. When rumours go unanswered, outbreaks last longer and confidence in health services falls, which is why health teams need to see what communities ask as it happens, in one place, early enough to answer before a rumour changes what people should be doing.
Training on information integrity, media and AI literacy, prebunking and crisis simulation, plus the evaluation frameworks that show whether it worked. All sources are analysed around your questions and validated by analysts, with each dataset visible only to its owners.
How we work
Disease surveillance and alerts
Real time monitoring of the sources and diseases your team selects, with alerts when something moves.
Early signals of public concern
Social listening shows which questions and worries are emerging, and in which regions and communities, before they appear in health facilities.
Misinformation management
We identify which health rumours circulate, in which languages and on which channels, separate misinformation from deliberate disinformation, and score each concern by spread and severity. The findings become Q&A, key messages and response guidance for health teams.
Community feedback
Hotlines, surveys and field channels show what communities ask and need during an outbreak, and we analyse them alongside the online conversation so that neither is interpreted alone.
Perception and opinion research
Representative surveys and qualitative work show what people believe about a disease, a vaccine or a health service and why, and helps test campaign messages before launch.
Our work in practice
Early signals and disease monitoring
We detect early signs of disease and public concern so that teams can act before a problem grows. For the Pacific Community, we replaced a largely manual surveillance process with real-time monitoring of 17 diseases and an alert system now run jointly with their analysts, so that teams spend their time on interventions instead of collection. For UNICEF Kazakhstan, an AI dashboard tracking immunisation concerns surfaced a sharp regional peak in measles conversation, which led health authorities to investigate locally and launch a campaign in the affected area.
Outbreak response and rumour tracking
We follow what people ask and believe during outbreaks, so that response teams can answer concerns while they are still live. Since 2024, we have supported UNICEF Eastern and Southern Africa during cholera, mpox and Ebola responses, combining online listening with community feedback and epidemiological insight, including one cholera analysis across ten countries from Angola to Zimbabwe. During COVID-19, we tracked what people were asking worldwide for UNICEF’s Private Fundraising and Partnerships division, and country offices around the world adopted the dashboards and alerts.
Community feedback for country offices
We turn community feedback into evidence that programme teams can act on quickly. i-Hear-U, the AI platform we built for UNICEF and first deployed in Nepal in 2022, connects directly to the KoboToolbox surveys field teams already use, with analysts validating every result. In Mozambique it moved reporting from monthly to weekly, and more than 20 UNICEF offices now use it.
Public health campaigns and trusted messengers
We identify and brief the voices audiences trust, so that campaigns reach people beyond institutional channels. For two global public health campaigns, we led creator recruitment, screening and briefing science communicators and community voices who reached more than six million people, most of them without fees.