Mass Channel Project

Tuesday, 11 December 2007

How can cellphones be used to provide support to the millions of people infected or affected by HIV/Aids in South Africa? This is the question that a new Cell-Life project will address in the coming three years. Cellphones have great potential as a mechanism to provide interactive communication and information services to the HIV community.  There are around 30 million active cellphone users in the country, close to two-thirds of the population. There also are many companies offering data services like ringtones and downloadable pictures – but very few services relevant to HIV. The system can be used to receive information, to build capacity to interact within an organisation, to promote peer-to-peer communication, ‘social networking’ and many more. The issue is less the technology, but more the social usage – how best can we use cellphones to support the self-organisation, treatment, education and actions of the HIV-affected community in South Africa? A range of technologies are possible: we would like the system to be able to be used however people can use their cellphone. We will endeavour to make the system free to the end-user. SMS will definitely be used, as will the chat-type systems using GPRS (such as the popular MXit application). We will experiment with voice, cellphone games, video and more. In 2008 we will set up a steering committee; conduct needs analysis on relevant information for such a system; develop a trial system; and run pilots in two communities. We expect to be working with the Treatment Action Campaign and other groups in the Western Cape, and LoveLife in KwaZulu-Natal. In the 2nd and 3rd years of the project, lessons from the pilot sites will be fed back into system development, and a wider scale rollout will be explored. The funding comes from the Vodacom Foundation and a SA family trust known as the RAITH Foundation (which incidently has nothing to do with Matthias Rath).

 

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