Center for Health Market Innovations (CHMI)

Programs

Texting4Health

last updated Sep 27, 2011

Overview

Implementing organization: 
The United Nations
Year Launched: 
2009
Stage: 
Short-term project
Income Level of Target Population: 
All income levels

Funding

Primary Source of Funding: 
Donor
Funders: 
Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (UN-DESA), MTN, Praekelt Foundation, Text to Change (TTC), World Health Organization (WHO)

Technology

Technology Used: 
Phones
Summary: 

The UN is launching, on Wednesday the 1st of July 2009, a ten-day initiative intended to reach out to 10,000 people in Uganda through mobile phones to demonstrate the reach and potential use of mobile phones in health information and promotion.

Key program components: 

The initiative, "Texting4Health" will invite residents of Uganda"s second largest commercial city of Jinja to participate in a short health quiz using text messages. These messages are free to the consumer and are designed to serve a public health information campaign.

Texting4Health will use the same approach as two previous programs for HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention campaigns in Uganda. The results of the Texting4Health demonstration will be shared with Ministers of UN Member States at the Annual Ministerial Review (AMR) session of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in Geneva in July 2009. The initiative is sponsored by UN"s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA) and the Uganda Ministry of Health. Text to Change (TTC), a Dutch non-profit organization, will provide its mobile telephony platform. They will send out SMS (short message service) questions on health prevention and promotion provided by the World Health Organization to 10,000 mobile subscribers.

Prior to that, TTC will inform the public with announcements via SMS and other media. Mobile health, or mHealth, takes advantage of the broad adoption of mobile telephones in countries to reach the public with health messages for promotion and prevention. The objective of this short campaign is to draw attention to the potential of mHealth. It aims to create awareness and interest by demonstrating the possibilities to collect information in real time and showing the ease of outreach to citizens with mobile phones. The campaign will engage Ugandans in a SMS quiz on health prevention and promotion; phone users will be able to "opt in" the campaign at no cost. Participating individuals will then receive confirmation of their responses.

Additional Information

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