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Mobile Quizzes For HIV/AIDS Awareness: Zain and Text to Change

Posted by AnneryanHeatwole on May 18, 2010

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Mobile Quizzes For HIV/AIDS Awareness: Zain and Text to Change data sheet 7071 Views

In Kenya, a partnership between the non-profit organization Text to Change and the telecommunications company Zain used SMS mobile quizzes to keep Zain’s employees up-to-date on the latest HIV/AIDS information.

For four weeks in November and December of 2009, Zain’s Kenyan employees were part of a pilot program for SMS mobile quizzes. Employees received three multiple choice questions each week that focused on different aspects of HIV/AIDS such as prevention and treatment. The quizzes also directed participants to testing centers in order to learn their HIV/AIDS status. Says Bas Hoefman, co-founder and managing director of Text to Change,  the choice to partner their mobile program with a telecommunications company was logical: “We thought, ‘why isn’t Zain using its own products – mobile telephony and SMS – to educate its own employees?’  Use your own product for your own employees.”

Basic Information
Website URL: 
http://www.texttochange.org/
Organization involved in the project?: 
Text to Change
Project goals: 

Use interactive quizzes to increase awareness of HIV/AIDS among Zain employees in Kenya.

 

Brief description of the project: 

Text to Change partnered with telecommunications company Zain to run an HIV/AIDS awareness campaign. The pilot used interactive SMS quizzes based on Text to Change's existing SMS platform to get employees to answer questions about HIV/AIDS, and to encourage them to get tested for HIV/AIDS. The pilot ran for four weeks in November and December of 2009, and had an overall response rate of 43%.

Text to Change offers interactive mobile SMS quizzes, combining knowledge transfer with incentives in the form of airtime. The SMS Quiz is designed to raise and help resolve key issues around local development programs.

Target audience: 

The target audience was 506 Zain employees in Kenya.

 

Detailed Information
Mobile Tools Used: 
Text to Change
Length of Project (in months) : 
1
Status: 
Ended/Complete
What worked well? : 
  • The 43% response rate was considered encouraging, and the fact that there was a 10% increase in employees who sought health services during the course of the pilot.
  • Text to Change also found that the partnership was a good foundation for setting up telecommunications contacts in order to launch future projects outside of their home-base country, Uganda.

 

What did not work? What were the challenges?: 

The pilot faced several challenges:

  • Employees didn't want their co-workers to see them going to the on-site testing center because of the stigma of HIV/AIDS.
  • Due to the sensitive nature of some questions, Text to Change had to ensure the privacy of the employees' responses.
  • Adapting Text to Change's technology from Uganda (where the company is based) to run in Kenya.