Uproars over Vaginas: Scaling SRHR Mobi-content in Africa.
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More and more, organizations are leveraging mobile technology to reach the nearly half of the world's population that's under 25. This talk will highlight learnings around scaling sexual health content on mobile, looking specifically at TuneMe, a mobisite for youth engagement that began in Zambia and has expanded to Zimbabwe and Malawi. How do you reach both men and women with your content? What do you do when youth don't want to leave your Facebook site? The talk will provide solutions to these challenges and shed insights on effective ways to scale regionally.
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Uproars over Vaginas: Scaling SRHR Mobi-content in Africa.
- 1. Uproars over Vaginas: Scaling SRHR Mobi-Content in Africa by Ambika Samarthya, Head of Communications
- 2. Founded in South Africa in 2007, we create, design, and implement open source mobile technologies to improve the wellbeing of people in low and middle income countries. Introducing Praekelt.org
- 3. Early innovations in SRHR content on mobile
- 4. Play video
- 5. Rapid scale-up and expansion Soon, YoungAfricaLive reached 1.85 million youth across South Africa, Kenya and Tanzania.
- 6. What made YoungAfricaLive successful? Engaging content Partnership with MNO User-First Positioning Create an engaging place to talk about LSR: edutainment content drove perception and behavior change, in a voice that youth related to. Offer service on a zero- rated system so youths without data plans can have access its essential information. Focus on broader issues around HIV - love, sex, and relationships. 21 3
- 7. What made YoungAfricaLive successful? Reaching Guys and Girls First-person Stories Many SRHR programs aim to reach girls. Without engaging boys, we’re only addressing a fraction of the problem. Leverage stories by real users creating a safe space for youth to engage with each other and discuss sensitive topics. 54
- 8. TuneMe is a sexual and reproductive health and rights mobile-optimized website aimed at improving the lives of youths in Sub-saharan Africa by empowering them to make informed decisions around their bodies. Our objectives
- 9. With the support of UNFPA and Ford Foundation, TuneMe is live in Zambia, Malawi, and Zimbabwe, and will be expanding to an additional 3 countries by the end of 2016. Our progress
- 10. Tune Me Putting the user first This is NOT just for the user proactively looking for answers: we want to prevent something happening before it’s a problem.
- 11. Tune Me User-generated content Incentivize youth through airtime packages Distill copy & pair with fact based articles Learn from the data: feedback loop
- 12. Working in a continuum Challenges Social reality Tech innovation
- 13. Working in a continuum Sexual Health Sensitivities Organizations with invested interests in government VS Local youth focused groups on the ground
- 14. Working in a continuum Cultural changes Society is evolving - there are now many shades of grey. Hard and fast doesn’t change status quo.
- 15. Working in a continuum Media consumption Higher Facebook penetration rates due to easier access on feature phones. Optimize all mediums!
- 16. Tap into mobile to reach youth. Work within continuums. Live where your community lives - have methodology that matches context. Take-aways
Editor's Notes
- One of the key projects that Praekelt founded was launched on World Aids Day 2009 and was called YoungAfricaLive. YAL was originally sparked by the discovery that in a country with the biggest HIV/AIDS pandemic in the world, none of South Africa's large mobile portals held a single piece of information about the disease; where to get tested; how to avoid getting it, and how to practice safe sex. YAL grew a ‘safe sex-savvy’ community by actively encouraging user-generated commentary around often sensitive topics. The ability to remain anonymous while at the same time posting very personal problems, questions and confessionals to the greater YAL community, was key in the product’s effectiveness for an African market.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwOU7pn7x4Y
- With over one million unique users in South Africa, Kenya and Tanzania, 2.2 million comments and 78 million page views YAL is having a profound effect on the lives of South African youth. There are more than 70,000 new unique users joining per month, 94,000 new comments on stories per month, and on average 4 million page views per month
- While the brief was to make it a HIV messaging platform, our content strategy focused on love sex and relationship to bring a wider audience to the content and because we know those are the forces that drives ultimately can lead to HIV. Most danger is that people don’t think HIV or STIs happens to you - YAL made engaging place to talk about LSR with other guys and girls and HIV became the subtext. Our partnership with Vodacom, a large mobile network operator in South Africa. YAL became the most popular section of Vodafone Live! By partnering with Vodafone, we were able to offer the platform on a zero-rated system so youth without data plans could access its essential information. Leverage first person stories and narratives: You come to an SRHR site and you usually see facts and articles. We leverage stories by real users on the same topics as examples of right or wrong choices made by people “just like you.” Hearing users talk about themselves and share and that’s very powerful. We believe there’s lots of merits in the comments girls have on content geared towards boys and vice versa. One of the reasons YAL was so successful was that it showed the sexes that their opinions didn’t align. There’s a lot of usefulness in explaining genders to each other, even if it’s it’s just how girls can understand boys better!
- While the brief was to make it a HIV messaging platform, our content strategy focused on love sex and relationship to bring a wider audience to the content and because we know those are the forces that drives ultimately can lead to HIV. Most danger is that people don’t think HIV or STIs happens to you - YAL made engaging place to talk about LSR with other guys and girls and HIV became the subtext. Our partnership with Vodacom, a large mobile network operator in South Africa. YAL became the most popular section of Vodafone Live! By partnering with Vodafone, we were able to offer the platform on a zero-rated system so youth without data plans could access its essential information. Leverage first person stories and narratives: You come to an SRHR site and you usually see facts and articles. We leverage stories by real users on the same topics as examples of right or wrong choices made by people “just like you.” Hearing users talk about themselves and share and that’s very powerful. We believe there’s lots of merits in the comments girls have on content geared towards boys and vice versa. One of the reasons YAL was so successful was that it showed the sexes that their opinions didn’t align. There’s a lot of usefulness in explaining genders to each other, even if it’s it’s just how girls can understand boys better!
- Fast forward to 2015 and we see the launch of Tune Me : TuneMe is a sexual and reproductive health and rights mobile-optimized website aimed at improving the lives of youths in Sub-Saharan Africa by empowering them to make informed decisions around their bodies.
- TuneMe took many of the insights from YAL around content strategy. What we have here is a program that has user-first thinking: using and linking content that’s engaging to surfacing content around home page, headline writing. We are NOT aimed just to the user who is proactively looking for an answer as many SRHR orgs do. We want to prevent something happening before it’s a problem. How do we do this? We get there through engaging content. So you want to talk about unhealthy relationships? Let’s start with a story on love. It’s all about providing context. With TuneMe we leverage stories and examples of right choices and wrong choices to make them understand the complexity of these facts. For example, we commission 10 local writers - 5 girls and 5 guys - to write about their first time. Then we edit their stories, and pair them with fact based articles to share stories and information. People who are in similar situations can relate.
- Slowly we moved away from commissioning to incentivizing youth people to share stories for data packages. The end user gives us a story that tells us about everything - then we distill to the messages and we pair it with fact based articles. We rely on the those articles to make the insights useful. User generated content also provides us a feedback loop that shows what’s happening in different areas. This story got a lot of attention on FB. its a nice piece because we usually speak to GIRLS on saying no, so i think the unexpected nature of the guy wanting to say no led to interesting discussions on FB. via the Your Words competition element on the site. Users are asked to submit their story on a certain topic, and if we publish their story, they can win K50 airtime, that topic this competition came from was 'A friend in need' competition described itself as: Growing up can mean friends become your first line of support. Are your friends a support to you? What problems do friends come and share with you, and what do you need to share with a friend? Tell us your story about how your friends have been your greatest support - or have they given you BAD advice!
- One, is the pushing the envelope around sensitivities over sexual health content. Words like penis, sex, and vagina are obviously part of our work, and for YAL we were easily able to engage through those conversations, but as work with larger NGOs and global organizations, who have more embedded interests in the government, we have to be careful. Restrictions and inter dependencies don’t allow us to always share all the information we want or have. But this is not the case with all organizations. One of the ways in which we can achieve our goals is to also pair and work with local organisations. We are discovering that local organizations who work directly with youth are comfortable covering topics in different ways, whereas larger orgs whose work is dependent on relationships with governments so they have tried to tread softly. Do you deal with youth - or do you sit in an office?
- We think of the new pope. gay marriage being legalized. The whole world is moving fast, but not always in a straight line as recent elections have shown. We have to be careful to understand the pulse of change and our youth teams as well as our local content writers helps with this. We were surprised by how much resistance there has been on TuneMe fb site around a recent article on vaginas. We have to talk about these things, but not ostracize those we are trying to reach. The territories we are working in, Malawi and Zimbabwe for example, are heavily Christian and against pre-marital sex, but that’s shifting as well. So is how governments view same sex relationships.
- The other continuum we are witnessing how the development of low-end (cheaper) smart phones as well as more evolved feature phones has impacted media consumption. At the time of YAL, we weren’t seeing the the kind of market penetration of FB we are seeing today. YAL was only a mobisite and today we know many people coming to TuneME via FB who don’t leave FB and rather engage direct on the social sites. Partially this is happening because you can access fb much easier now on feature phones. We’re now attempting to make these platforms work together. Now that we have two active platforms coexisting, we need to see how they support each other. For example we are allowing for our monthly live chat with experts on the mobisite to move to FB. The YAL live text chat was a huge popular feature where users asked questions on a first come first serve tool. By moving this engagement to FB we are hoping to build relationships with our community. People have different needs that you can separate out. If you need a specific piece of info, you go to mobisite. If you want to engage with others, you go to FB. We need to optimize both mediums.
- Take Aways: You must tap into mobile to reach youth. You must work within continuums. Live where your community lives - have methodology that matches context.