The 10-Minute App That Made 60 Million People "Visible" / TELENOR "NAMING THE INVISIBLE PAKISTANIS"

The problem

Without a birth certificate, you can't get medical care or education, and you're left unprotected from child labor and trafficking. Registering at a government office is hard if you can't read or write, and in rural areas, many people didn't even know the process existed. But in Pakistan, SIM card ownership was over 80%, most of it on Android phones. Smartphones had reached people before the government ever did.

The insight

What Telenor wanted was a foothold in rural markets and to overcome people's distrust of foreign companies. The people most likely to be left out of the system were exactly the ones who couldn't read or write. How do you solve that contradiction? They found the one point where business, a social problem, and trust could all be solved at once.

The idea

Health workers went door to door with the app on their phones, entering parents' names and addresses, and just taking photos with the camera for anything else. Even if someone couldn't write, the phone could write for them. Registration that used to take three days now took 10 minutes. Payment for the health workers was also made through mobile payments via the app.

What happened

The program spread to 426 villages, registering more than 1.2 million children — double the original goal. Half of them were girls. At Cannes Lions, it won Grand Prix in both the Mobile and Media categories, making it Pakistan's first-ever Grand Prix win.

Afterthought

This ad gave people their names. The very first child registered was a boy named Jeet, who couldn't read or write. He's not invisible anymore. More than the awards, it's those 1.2 million names that carry the real weight.

Awards

• Cannes Lions Grand Prix 2020

Featured in

• The Ad Is Gone, But the System RemainsFrom a university for taxi drivers to a sidewalk you can read with a cane

Tags