The Pop!Tech Blog

Project Masiluleke: Tackling HIV with technology

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• Author: Bobbie Johnson
• Posted: October 24th, 2008 @ 12:14pm
• Info: bio / all posts
• Tags: accelerator, africa, healthcare, Pop!Tech08, Project M
  

In Zulu, the word masiluleke means “lend a helping hand” and “give wise counsel” - a concept at the heart of a new project announced this morning at Pop!Tech.

Project Masiluleke, which spun out of a talk by HIV campaigner Zinny Thabethe at Pop!Tech 2006, is attempting to wrestle back some initiative in the HIV-Aids crisis in Africa.

The context here is important, Thabethe tells the audience. The organization is centered around KwaZulu-Natal, a province in South Africa that is the most HIV-affected in a country which has more than 5m infected citizens. KZN is the epicenter of the pandemic - and yet only a small percentage of people ever get tested for the virus (the testing rate average 5% across the whole of South Africa, despite the fact that in some areas one in six people are infected).

“People are only coming to healthcare when there is a crisis - and it is usually when they are about to die. Anti retroviral treatment is available for free, and you would think - but something is not working right there.”

There’s still a stigma, she explains, which prevents people from visiting clinics to get tested - or even from talking freely about the epidemic.

The first step for Project M: a text message information campaign run in conjunction with one of South Africa’s biggest cell networks, MTN. The scheme will see a million messages sent for free every day (using free space in so-called “Please Call Me” SMS system that’s prevalent across the continent) sending people information about HIV. That’s been pioneered by Gustav Praekelt from the Praekelt Foundation.

It sounds simple, but the results have been startling: pilot projects have seen phone calls to the National Aids Helpline increase from 1,000 a day to 4,000, largely from the communities that most need help. And it’s a model that could be expanded across the rest of Africa.

The next step - possibly the most important - involves developing and distributing free home testing kits so that without the stigma associated of going to a clinic. This, say campaigners, could help make the biggest difference to battling the pandemic.

Third, Project M aims to provide personalized healthcare information for people who are being treated, with reminders to get them - hooking into an existing text alert system to ensure that people who have been contacted and tested make sure they get the treatment they need.

Robert Fabricant, the creative director of Frog Design (which has worked on how to implement this project) comes on stage to explain how the process has worked - including a total reboot when they realized their initial solution didn’t address the problem.

“The question is not ’should we do this’ or ‘how should we do this?’,” said Dr Krista Dong of iTeach. “It’s ‘how fast can we do this?’. We heard about the need for this over and over and over again on the ground.”

If you want to find out more about the scheme, there’s already some news coverage, and much more information on Project M here on our website. Plus you can read about the Pop!Tech accelerator program, which this is part of.

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