Our role
Design the service, build the part that carries it, and hand the whole thing over to a team that can keep it running without us.
The brief
The people most exposed were the least likely to report it.
A public perception survey across Irbid, Mafraq, and Amman in 2021 found a gap that awareness does not explain. Knowledge of available protection services ran at 40% among women and 46% among men — close enough that information alone was clearly not the binding constraint. The gap was about what reporting costs.
8%
Of women and girls would report a cybercrime on their own
40%
Of men and boys would do the same
The head of AWO’s Mafraq center described it directly: women are frequently too intimidated to report being a victim for fear of being shamed by the community, and where the incident involves a relationship outside accepted social norms, that fear compounds.
A service that requires someone to walk into a police station, give a name, and explain what happened is a service most of the people it exists for will not use. What was needed was not more information. It was a confidential route to help — and one that AWO Mafraq, with no technical staff and no budget for a developer, could operate itself.
What we did
Designed the service, then built only what the service depended on.
Tareek began as the highest-priority recommendation in AWO’s digital maturity assessment — so the requirement arrived evidenced. The design question was never what was technically possible. It was what would still be working a year later in an office with no technical staff.
01 / Discover
Inherited a baseline, then tested the design on the community
ISEET had already audited AWO’s infrastructure, staff competencies, and service workflows during the maturity assessment, and the gap between demand for cybercrime support and AWO’s capacity to deliver it remotely was the widest finding in that report. AWO was consulted at every decision point as the authority on what Mafraq’s communities actually need, and community members were brought in to react to the proposed solutions before they were finalized.
02 / Design
Made confidentiality the design constraint, not a feature
Tareek was scoped around two core functions: a hub of educational material on the forms cybercrime takes and how to stay safe online, and a signposting service routing people to the right provider — the Public Security Directorate for reporting, community-based organizations for psychosocial support. Everything else followed from the requirement that a person could seek help without being identified. An enquiry reaches a service provider without disclosing who made it. Victims can speak anonymously with vetted female counsellors, browsing each provider’s description and choosing the one that suits them.
Accessibility was designed in alongside it: the chatbot accepts written messages or voice notes, and the explanatory video on how to reach help was produced in Arabic, English, and sign language. Around these sits an informative website with a content management layer, and a learning hub carrying material and e-brochures from the community police safety campaigns, free and open to local community members and other CBOs.
03 / Develop
Custom-built where it mattered, off-the-shelf where it didn’t
The build was split deliberately. The public site and learning hub were assembled on an Arabic-capable website builder rather than written as custom code — a decision made on operability, not cost. AWO staff had to be able to add a page, publish an article, and update content without knowing a programming language, and a bespoke site would have made them dependent on a developer they did not have.
The chatbot was the exception, and was custom-developed for AWO and integrated with Facebook Messenger. The confidential referral logic sits at the center of the service — routing an enquiry to the right vetted provider without exposing who made it — and that was not something a configured tool could carry. Effort went where the service actually lived.
04 / Deploy
Handed over with a manual, in Arabic
Tareek launched publicly on August 4, 2022, and delivery closed with a written user guide in Arabic covering every component: how to edit and publish platform pages, how to add sections and set page keywords for search, how to run the Facebook page, how to schedule and configure remote sessions, and how the chatbot operates. The guide was written for AWO Mafraq’s staff as the standing reference, not as a project closeout document — because the test of this engagement was whether the organization could keep operating the service after the engagement ended.
Left: the Tareek platform in Arabic. Right: the confidential referral chatbot in conversation.
A service that requires you to give your name excludes the people who most need it. A platform that requires a developer excludes the organization that owns it. Both had to be solved, and the second one is why it is still running.
ISEET information technology expert
Outcome
Handed over, then taken over.
Tareek received more than 1,352 messages in its first 20 days of operation. By September 2022, over 270 people had been referred through it to a service provider. For a governorate-level center whose previous reach depended on people physically arriving at its door, that is a different order of service.
When the first subscription year ended, AWO took the platform over and continued it under its own ownership — no new procurement, no return to a developer, no dependency on the organization that built it.
Four years on, Tareek is still running at tareek.net, and it has grown past what we handed over. AWO has added a directory of authorized referral bodies, a services section, published research on cybercrime in Jordanian communities and a public perception survey on community safety, and launched a Digital Culture Ambassadors program — none of which existed at handover. The organization did not simply keep the platform alive. It extended it.
1,352
Messages received in the first 20 days
270+
People referred to support providers by September 2022
4
Years running under AWO ownership
Most handovers are ceremonial. The document is signed, the credentials are passed across, and the system quietly stops being maintained. This one held, because operability was treated as a design constraint rather than a closing formality. The technology was chosen so that a small team with no developer could keep publishing, keep answering, and keep building — and the clearest evidence that the choice was right is a platform that now contains work we had nothing to do with.
The assessment behind this
Specified by an assessment, not a catalogue.
Tareek exists because an assessment said it should, and said so with the evidence to support it. The maturity assessment that specified this platform is a case study in its own right.
Specified by ISEET’s digital maturity assessment of AWO
4D — Discover · Design · Develop · Deploy
Custom chatbot; configured site build for non-technical staff
August 4, 2022
tareek.net — operated and extended by AWO since 2023
Considering something similar?
If you are trying to deliver support to people who cannot come to you, the first question is what that channel has to do — and who will be running it a year from now.
Related work
Civil Society & Protection
CBO Digital Maturity Assessment — Jordan
The assessment that specified this platform — infrastructure, competencies, and process, measured before anything was built.
Read →
Specified by ISEET's digital maturity assessment of AWO
4D — Discover · Design · Develop · Deploy
Custom chatbot; configured site build for non-technical staff
August 4, 2022
tareek.net — operated and extended by AWO since 2023
The platform behind this
Immunify is a product, not a bespoke build: six modules covering stock, cold chain, temperature, workforce, learning, and reporting.