This is the second blog in a two-part series about the state of HIV/AIDS in South Africa and current mHealth initiatives addressing HIV/AIDS in the country. This post presents current mHealth initiatives in South Africa. Read Part 1 here.
A tremendous need to combat HIV/AIDS in South Africa and an unprecedented level of mobile penetration are just two of the reasons for various mHealth initiatives in South Africa.
With mobile penetration higher than 100% and with mobile phones’ various features, mobile hold tremendous untapped potential as a tool for public engagement. Mobile phones have an ability to close the information gap and increase awareness, encourage people to learn their HIV status earlier, connect people to existing clinical services for testing and treatment, as also increase adherence to Antiretroviral (ARV) regimens once in treatment.
Young Africa Live, the most scalable solution, is a mobile entertainment portal designed to engage young people on general and sexual health topics. YAL is a mobile blog where a cross-section of young contributors from all over South Africa share their feelings and thoughts on health, sexual health and gender. As told by Praekelt’s Marcha Neetling, “YAL has today over one million unique users in South Africa, Kenya and Tanzania, 2.2 million comments and 78 million page views.” For more information, look at the video here.
There are other various initiatives that are focusing primarily on awareness, one of them being a new initiative by Praekelt Foundation called MomConnect. It uses SMS to remind pregnant mothers of critical clinic visits during pregnancy, as also about check-ups and immunizations post-delivery, until the child is 18 months old.
Similarly, Hi4Life focuses on pregnant women, new mothers and young women through giving information on: sexual & reproductive health, pregnancy, motherhood, fatherhood and baby health care. Coming back to youth, H360 is a social network support program offering information to young people affected by HIV/AIDS. The site raises awareness, facilitates discussion, improves cross-cultural learning and mobilises collaborative action on HIV/AIDS amongst young people.
Another interesting project is Project Masiluleke (which means “give wise counsel” and “lend a helping hand” in Zulu) that was built to raise awareness of HIV status, encourage HIV/AIDS testing and treatment by SMS. To reach out as many people as possible, over 2 billion messages were sent through ”Please Call Me” [1] text messages, which has led to close to 2 million calls generated at the National AIDS Helpline. In addition, Project Masiluleke also offers TxtAlert, an SMS reminder system for people on chronic medication, with the initial focus on ARV-appointment reminders.
There are various other initiatives focusing on HIV/AIDS in South Africa. One of them being the AIDS Awareness Management Program, which empowers health workers with the use of mHealth-enabled mobile phones, allowing them to record information and participant details. Similarly, a service empowering Mentor Mothers with mobile devices trains Mentor Mothers, mothers living with HIV themselves, to provide life-saving health education and psychosocial support to their peers. Mentor Mothers become role models in their communities, putting a face to empowered, strong, and healthy HIV-positive women. They also collect information with mobile devices.
It is more than evident that there are various mHealth services. Yet once again fragmentation is more than obvious. Is the role of the GSMA to connect mobile operators and wider mHealth eco-system and create better opportunities to support universal health access? And if yes, how do we achieve interoperability between mobile and health stakeholders?
If you are interested in various mHealth initiatives happening in South Africa, and elsewhere, please have a look at the mHealth Tracker here. If you are aware of any other mHealth initiative that we are not listing on our mHealth tracker we would be very keen to learn more about it. In addition you can have a look at the GSMA report published at Mobile Health Summit: Using mHealth to Support Universal Health Access.