RedChatZone: HIV Counselling via Mobile Instant Messaging Chat

Posted by kdetolly on Aug 13, 2010

In South Africa, the number of cellphones greatly outweighs the number of landlines. The National Aids Helpline (NAHL) is free to call from a landline, but regular cellphone rates apply. This makes the NAHL expensive to use from a cellphone, or people have to make use of public phones which are often within earshot of others.

Cell-Life and LifeLine worked together to make HIV counselling more accessible to young South Africans in a medium which is comfortable and familiar to them. Marlon Parker, who started the successful Angel drug counselling service on MXit, was brought in to implement a similar system.

MXit is a very popular downloadable (instant messaging) chat application, where users can add contacts and text/chat to each other at a very low cost. Without getting into a technical description of the system, here is the basic outline of how the service was created:

A contact that MXit users could add - RedChatZone - was created.
A web-based system was created to enable counsellors to provide text-based counselling from their PC to MXit users.
A small amount of 'splash screen' advertising was done on MXit to inform users about RedChatZone.
Users then added RedChatZone, allowing them to chat to a counsellor.
Any MXit user can now add the RedChatZone contact, and will pay as little as $0.01 in data costs for a conversation with a trained counsellor.

Basic Information

Website URL:

http://www.cell-life.org

Organization involved in the project?:

Cell-Life

Project goals:

The main goal of this project was to create a mobile-based platform for youth and young adults to learn more about HIV and get support by offering them the ability to communicate anonymously and privately with a trained counselor at a very low cost.

Brief description of the project:

This project has enabled MXit users to have a conversation with a trained counsellor on their cellphone at a very low cost (around $0.01 in data costs). This has made HIV counselling more accessible and private to users, and has made the counselling process more efficient.

Target audience:

The 18 million MXit users; generally South Africans between the ages of 12 and 35.

One counsellor can counsel many clients at the same time

Detailed Information

Mobile Tools Used:

MXit

Length of Project (in months) :

Status:

Ongoing

What worked well? :

Mobile text-chat is an ideal way of providing HIV counselling: it's cheap for users; people can get counselling from anywhere (like their bedroom); it's efficient for providers (as counsellors can counsel many people at the same time); and it's an appropriate way of getting youth to talk about HIV.

Research has shown that users sometimes struggle to call the National AIDS Helpline from a landline because it's difficult to talk about certain things for fear of someone overhearing. They felt more comfortable using the service on a cellphone as it would seem like they were just chatting with a friend on MXit.

The MXit "splash screen" advertising used on National AIDS Day (1st December 2009) increased the use of the service by roughly 4000%. There were even more people queuing, though unfortunately there were not enough counsellors to handle the demand.

Training counsellors to understand "chat" language allowed them to communicate on the same level as the users. Once they were used to text-based counselling, they were able to handle up to 10+ conversations at the same time. Also, due to the less personal nature of chat, counsellors found that users would get to the point far quicker.

Hoax calls are a big problem for South African helplines; the National AIDS Helpline find that up to 80% of calls are hoax, which wastes a lot of counsellor time. On MXit, this decreased dramatically, and the few that there are are easy to deal with as the counsellor can ignore them and carry on with their other conversations. A possible reason for the decrease in hoax calls is that this costs the user a small amount of airtime that could rather have been spent on chatting with friends.

Below are some other features of the system:

It’s very cheap to use: a counselling session will cost the user about US$0.01 in airtime.
Counsellors can view the chat history of clients, removing the need for the client to repeat ground already covered in previous counselling sessions.
Usage statistics can be obtained as and when needed, making staff and service management easier.
The conversation text can be made available for analysis (though privacy also needs to be taken into consideration).
Counselling can be provided from any computer connected to the internet, saving on call-centre infrastructure costs.

What did not work? What were the challenges?:

Currently there are only 1-5 counsellors available between 1pm and 3pm. Whilst for most days this is fine (the average number of conversations in a 2-hour session is 46), on days where there have been large numbers of conversation requests (due to advertising the service), the counsellors have not been able to meet the demand. This could easily be fixed by employing a more counsellors, however there are budget constraints preventing this.