Aselo: Helping the World’s Children
We are helping the global child helpline movement triple the numbers of children they help each year, without significantly growing their costs. By building Aselo, a modern, open source contact center platform in partnership with Child Helpline International, which represents 169 child helplines in 139 countries, we expect to serve more than 100 million children each year.
Social Problem Addressed
Child helplines are often the first place called when a child is in crisis. Young people need the right help quickly. Right now, the technology they use is not current and almost every helpline has “rolled their own” technology solution. Because very few helplines support social media communications platforms, there is a huge and widening gap of millions of children and youth who still struggle to make contact with child helpline services.
Here's What We're Doing
We are currently building a modern contact center platform that unifies the communications work of global child helplines, based on Twilio Flex technology. Aselo will allow children and youth to reach out to helplines using their preferred communications channel rather than just traditional toll-free helpline numbers. Children will have far more access points to reach the help they need including voice, webchat, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and email. We have ten national child helplines testing new prototype software releases, with a goal of having a child-ready platform deployed in early 2021 in South Africa and Zambia.
Partners and Supporters
Child Helpline International, Twilio, Facebook, the One Family Foundation and Schmidt Futures.
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