Dear TechNet community,
I'm excited to share that we've released a new version of Varo. Varo 2.2.0 is available via Google Play, and it includes a new feature we've been calling "Report an issue"; it lets the person creating a temperature report tell you what's wrong with the fridge, in their own words, with photos.
Why it matters
A logger can tell you a fridge got too warm. It can't tell you the door seal is torn, the clinic lost power all afternoon, or someone unplugged it while cleaning. The health worker standing in front of the fridge knows those things. Until now, that knowledge mostly stayed at the facility, or travelled in a phone call nobody wrote down.
What's new in Varo
While creating a report, tap Report an issue. Pick a category (Not cold, No power, Alarm, Error, Vandalism/theft or Other), describe what you saw in a sentence or two, and add a photo if it helps. The issue travels with the report email, and the photos come along as attachments.
On many phones you can tap the microphone and speak the description instead of typing it. Varo matches dictation to the phone's language and country, so people get a speech model trained on how they actually speak: Nigerian English rather than British English, for example. It's set up for English across our main regions plus Spanish, Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Swahili, Amharic, Somali, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Arabic, French and Portuguese, and it can use other languages the phone's speech service offers. Of course, typing always works too.
What this changes
Reports with an issue look different in your inbox. The subject line starts with ⚠️ instead of 📊 and ends with "| Issue Reported", and the email has a REPORT AN ISSUE section with the category and the reporter's description. When a batch of reports lands, you can spot the ones that need attention first without opening every email.
And because Varo reports are machine-readable, the issues don't have to stay scattered across individual emails. Pogo LT reads them along with the temperature data, so you can see every reported issue across a whole set of reports in one place.
Reviewing issues in Pogo LT
If your team already uses Pogo LT to summarize Varo reports, there's nothing new to set up. The workbook gains three columns (Issue Reported, Issue Type and Issue Description), so you can read the reporter's words next to what the logger recorded. Action cards for fridges with a reported issue are marked ISSUE REPORTED.
Action cards only cover a selection of fridges, chosen by alarm activity, so use the workbook as the complete list. Filter on Issue Reported and you'll see every issue in the period.
Make sure someone picks it up
A reported issue only helps if someone owns it. Pogo LT shows you the problem; who fixes it, and by when, stays with your team. A good first step: before your next reporting round, agree who reads incoming issues and how urgent ones get escalated. Then put each issue that needs work in your usual maintenance log with a name and a date.
And a quiet follow-up report isn't proof of a repair. If next month's report arrives without an issue, check with whoever did the work.
Guides you can share
- Report an equipment issue with Varo (for the people doing the reporting)
- Review reported issues in Pogo LT (for reviewers and supervisors)
- Organizing equipment-issue follow-up (a short PDF for programme and district teams)
- Release notes: Varo and Pogo LT
Tell us how it goes
If you try it, we'd love to hear what worked and where people got stuck. Does dictation work in your languages? What helps your team turn a reported issue into a repair? Reply here, or write to us at [email protected] if you'd like help planning a roll-out.
Cheers,
Bentley