IDEO & Women for Women International - Coach Carene Chatbot

Dimagi has received the WomenConnect Round 2 Award from USAID to create a direct-to-client conversational agent for participants of a women’s empowerment program in Rwanda. In partnership with Women for Women International and IDEO.org, Dimagi will innovate a chatbot called “Coach Carene”. Run on easily-accessible channels such as social media or smartphone messenger services, Coach Carene will facilitate an interactive, demand-driven approach to disseminating information and creating dialogue so that women can receive 1:1 coaching and advice about their legal rights; receive life-skills training including health information; learn business and vocational skills and gain access to income-generating opportunities.

A user of Coach Carene will type in their question or pick from an FAQ list and through the use of natural language processing (NLP), the chatbot will parse their query and automatically respond or escalate out-of-vocabulary queries to a human who can provide direct support. This transformative way of communicating with participants will enable demand-driven communication at scale and bring significant scale efficiencies in the way development communication operations are set up. At scale, Dimagi expects to support hundreds of women across Rwanda with this innovation.