COVID-19 Expert Helpdesk

The goal of the Covid-19 Expert Helpdesk is to address the lack of options for civil society organizations in managing Covid-19 risk so that these organizations can play a key role in addressing the social problems caused by Covid-19 in developing countries.

The Helpdesk will provide to these organizations an expert-backed Risk Management Analysis for navigating the various risks associated with Covid-19. The analysis has three components: 

1. Risk assessment: What is the risk of Covid-19 over the next 1 to 6 months in communities where an organization operates?

2. Risk communication:  How can an organization reduce the risk of Covid-19 for staff and its target populations through risk communication and behavior change strategies?

3. Risk adaptation: How can an organization adapt its operations given the risk of Covid-19?

Our initial focus will be on civil society organization in developing countries that work in the health, education and agriculture sectors.

Civil society organizations in developing countries lack the resources or internal capacity to manage Covid-19 risk. However, these civil society organizations will play a vital role in addressing the social problems caused by Covid-19.

Uncertainty related to Covid-19 risk creates challenges for organizations in preparing for and adapting to the impact of the disease. This, in turn influences decisions related to organization staff and policies for their target populations. 

One of the most prominent challenges in navigating Covid-19 risk is the lack of information on when cases will peak among target populations. While national-level Covid-19 risk projections continue to be shared by the media, these projections may or may not reflect the actual disaggregated risk faced by an organization’s target population. Taken together, the inability to predict risk and difficulties in understanding, communicating, and adapting to that risk make it challenging for organizations to develop plans on a 1- to 6-month time horizon.

All of the aforementioned challenges are exacerbated by the limited capacity of development-oriented organizations to search for and identify relevant expertise. 

OnFrontiers has launched the Covid-19 Expert Helpdesk via OnFrontiers.org to address the lack of options for civil society organizations in managing Covid-19 risk. OnFrontiers established OnFrontiers.org to address global challenges. OnFrontiers.org launched the Covid-19 Expert Helpdesk as a not-for-profit initiative to rapidly and efficiently help organizations prepare for and adapt to the impact of Covid-19.

The goal of the Covid-19 Expert Helpdesk is to address the lack of options for civil society organizations in managing Covid-19 risk so that these organizations can play a key role in addressing the social problems caused by Covid-19 in developing countries. 

The specific service that the Covid-19 Expert Helpdesk team will provide to civil society organizations is an expert-backed Risk Management Analysis for navigating the various risks associated with Covid-19. This Risk Management Analysis has three components: 

1. Risk assessment: What is the risk of Covid-19 over the next 1 to 6 months in communities where an organization operates?

2. Risk communication:  How can an organization reduce the risk of Covid-19 for staff and the communities it supports through risk communication and behavior change strategies?

3. Risk adaptation: How can an organization adapt its operations given the risk of Covid-19?

Our target population is the populations that civil society organizations in the health, education and agriculture sectors support in developing countries. To understand their needs and challenges our team is having conversations with the leaders of these organizations to understand how the Covid-19 Expert Helpdesk can best address those challenges. A consistent theme from our conversations is that these organizations are finding it extremely challenge to determine how to most appropriately modify their operations given the uncertainty of Covid-19 risk. For example, organizations often do not know which remote work strategies are most appropriate for their staff. One of our Covid-19 Helpdesk experts, John Ikeda, is an expert in remote work and international development. Organizations have expressed frustrations at understanding what the risk of Covid-19 will be over the next 1 to 6 months so that they can play accordingly. Dennis Carroll, another Helpdesk expert, can address these questions as he has over 30 years of leadership experience in global health and development. Until recently he served as the Director of USAID's Emerging Threats Division. In this position Dr. Carroll was responsible for providing strategic and operational leadership for the Agency's programs addressing new and emerging disease threats.

This challenge asks the question: how can communities around the world prepare for, detect, and respond to emerging pandemics and health security threats? Rather than providing a singular and short-term solution to address this challenge, we are proposing a solution that will facilitate efforts to tackle not only the COVID-19 pandemic, but also future pandemics and global emergencies in communities worldwide. In combating this crisis, we have the opportunity to build the infrastructure necessary for global knowledge transfer and communication that can be leveraged to solve a wide variety of global challenges in the future.

Covid-19 has created unprecedented challenges for organizations around the world, particularly for development-oriented organizations that are resource-constrained and must now deal with uncertainties in addition to the complex development challenges they were already addressing. Organizations must contend with tremendous ambiguity as they try to navigate the range of distortions imposed by this pandemic. Already capacity constrained, organizations face a particular challenge in identifying and engaging experts to help navigate their risks in this uncertain world. 

To address this complicated web of challenges, OnFrontiers is leveraging its experience bridging the gaps between knowledge demand and supply. OnFrontiers’ new Covid-19 Expert Helpdesk aims to enable civil society organizations to effectively and efficiently access expertise which can assist them in navigating the challenges they and their communities face as a consequence of Covid-19. OnFrontiers has already recruited more than 75 experts from around the world, to enable organizations to address the following challenges:

• Risk assessment (what is the risk of Covid-19 over the next 1 to 6 months in communities where an organization operates?)

• Risk communication (how can an organization reduce the risk of Covid-19 for staff and the communities it supports through risk communication and behavior change strategies?)

• Risk adaptation (how can an organization adapt its operations given the risk of Covid-19?)

Starting with customized engagements with 10 organizations, OnFrontiers hopes to rapidly scale the impact of its Helpdesk, by instituting mechanisms to facilitate knowledge-sharing between organizations in the development sector. 

OnFrontiers helps organizations build and manage their network of go-to experts and access new knowledge via one of the largest global expert marketplaces. We have developed the capability to custom match clients to experts on any topic, generally within 48 hours or less.There are over 35,000 registered experts in the OnFrontiers global marketplace, all of whom have been carefully curated from the public and private sectors. To address our clients’ needs as rapidly and effectively as possible, we have created recruiting channels to rapidly source experts from a much broader pool of approximately 300,000 experts. OnFrontiers has worked with over 100 clients across multiple sectors, with a particular focus on international development. Within the area of international development, we serve multiple philanthropic foundations, impact investors, and development implementers.

The platform includes the ability to:

• Custom match clients to experts on any topic, generally within 48 hours,

• Conduct paid or pro-bono phone consultations,

• Build and curate a searchable network of experts for a specific organization or project, 

• Communicate with experts via remote voice consultations and messaging along with capturing knowledge in the form of audio consultation logs, transcripts, and engagement logs.

The Expert Helpdesk leverages OnFrontiers’ enterprise product – a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that allows organizations to build their network of experts and access new expertise through a global expert marketplace.

OnFrontiers is an online knowledge platform with the mission to enable a world in which experts play a more meaningful and elevated role in the work of any organization. Experts use the platform to connect and engage more effectively with current and new clients seeking their unique expertise.  Businesses, non-profits, and government agencies use the platform to build and manage their knowledge network and to access new expertise from one of the world’s largest and most global expertise marketplaces. The OnFrontiers network spans over 100 countries and thousands of topics. Additional information is available here regarding how organizations become a client and how individuals become experts on the OnFrontiers website.

OnFrontiers’ platform enables the Helpdesk to generate impact rapidly and at scale. The platform provides organizations a much more efficient means of identifying appropriate experts for specific Covid-19 risk challenges compared to a counterfactual scenario in which each organization must identify these experts on their own.

One of the Helpdesk’s key advantages is that it leverages OnFrontiers’ proven model of success from the past five years. The Helpdesk is an extension of OnFrontiers’ work with clients across geographies and sectors. As a starting point, OnFrontiers has already onboarded more than 75 experts to the Helpdesk. 

The Covid-19 Expert Helpdesk is agile and designed to scale. At its core, this model scales knowledge and expertise, and effectively translates it into action within organizations around the world. Organizations are looking for answers to critical questions and lack the means to connect to experts and effectively translate this expertise into action. Our set of experts, coupled with our Engagement Manager model, will enable us to address this set of challenges rapidly and effectively. Our Engagement Manager approach ensures that organizations can connect to expertise, anticipate challenges, and respond to challenges appropriately. 

The Helpdesk will prioritize supporting non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and nonprofits in the health, education, and agriculture sectors in phase 1 of our work (July to September in 2020). We will quickly expand our work in phase 2 (starting in October 2020) to public sector institutions in developing countries and additional sectors (e.g., civic engagement, economic empowerment, systemic poverty).  

As more organizations utilize the Helpdesk, the impact it generates will become more cost effective.

As our Engagement Managers work with more organizations, we will develop a more efficient process of anticipating the challenges organizations will face, matching experts to organizations, and refining our process for supporting each organization. Working with more organizations will also enable our Engagement Managers to generate a knowledge base of key lessons learned based on feedback from organizations.