Academic research, articles, or white papers on mobiles in social development
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.
RedChatZone: HIV Counselling via Mobile Instant Messaging Chat Locations
RedChatZone: HIV Counselling via Mobile Instant Messaging Chat data sheet 7245 Views
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.
RedChatZone: HIV Counselling via Mobile Instant Messaging Chat Locations
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