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The Center for Utilizing Behavioral Insights for Children (CUBIC), Save the Children Indonesia, Save the Children’s Bangladesh-based technology team, and ideas42 collaborated to develop and test a Whatsapp Chatbot that can answer questions, make suggestions and encourage commitment to COVID-19 safe behavior. This short briefing note and infographic summarises the research and findings.

The COVID- 19 pandemic has caused great harm to children around the world, bringing loss and disruption to family life, household livelihoods and education. Along with vaccination, social distancing, mask wearing and hygiene remain important behaviors in the fight against COVID-19. Getting people to adopt these behaviors also remains difficult. In very large, populous and diverse countries such as Indonesia, this challenge is even greater.

Evidence suggests that offering targeted, individualised communication and support can help people to plan how to adapt their lives and make commitments to COVID-19 safe behaviors. Digital technology provides the most obvious route, especially as Indonesia has high levels of internet use and around 70% of the population use smartphones.

This research study explored the effectiveness of digital, interactive ways to support COVID-19 safe behavior, generating insights on the role of social desirability and risk perception in how digital communication interacts with individual behavior.