Innovative responses to HIV and Aids allow countries to make rapid, cost-effective gains against the epidemic while bypassing bottlenecks in service delivery.
Such innovations save lives, protect health and incorporate community feedback into the development agenda.
U-report, a communications technology platform launched by the Uganda office of the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) in 2011, is targeted at adolescents and young people.
It gives mobile phone users the tools they need to establish and enforce new standards of transparency and accountability in development programming and services.
Anyone with a mobile phone can become a “U-reporter” by texting the message “join” to a toll-free number and entering a few personal details.
Once enrolled, participants can share their observations and ideas on a wide range of development issues including HIV and Aids.
Because so many adolescents and young people are enthusiastic mobile phone and SMS users, the platform is especially suitable to them.
Uganda: Framing the question
The U-report team in Uganda and members of nine partner organisations meet regularly to decide which topics to discuss with the country’s young people.
Issues explored by U-reporters in their communities include female genital mutilation, safe water, HIV and Aids, early marriage and education.
Once the team settles on a subject, the question is sent from Unicef through SMS to U-reporters, who can respond with a simple menu-based reply or with personal messages.
The Unicef team analyses and interprets the responses, sharing the results and often following up with individual questions or suggestions.
The platform allows the team to get immediate feedback on questions, broken down by district, gender and age, which government and partners find especially helpful.
Less than a year after its Uganda launch, U-report had nearly 90 000 reporters — mainly youth — with hundreds more joining daily.
And on World Aids Day (December 1) last year, the platform debuted in Zambia as well, where it is being used to link young people with HIV-related services.
Zambia: U-report for HIV prevention
Although many young people in sub-Saharan Africa own mobile phones, there was no large-scale mobile health programme using SMS messaging to increase this group’s participation in national HIV and Aids responses.
Zambia’s U-report platform was designed to address this gap by expanding comprehensive knowledge of HIV prevention measures among U-reporters and increasing demand for services, including testing and counselling.
The programme provides confidential, individual and interactive HIV and sexually transmitted infection (STI) counselling free of charge through SMS.
It enables demand creation tailored to specific HIV services and referral to a location nearest to the user. It tracks and reports on knowledge gaps and emerging issues related to HIV and STI for use by other programmes. Between December 2012 and June 2013, more than 9 000 U-reporters joined the Zambia programme.
Nearly half (44%) of them were female; 35% were aged from 15 to 19, and 39% aged from 20 to 24.
Approximately 6 000 (64%) of these U-reporters engaged counsellors through SMS. According to an analysis of 13 000 SMS messages, the most commonly queried topics proved to be HIV and STI symptoms (28% of the total) and modes of transmission (18%).
This article forms part of a supplement paid for by Unicef. Contents and photographs were supplied and signed off by Unicef