Praekelt.org uses open source technologies to deliver essential information and vital services. Originally founded as Praekelt Foundation in 2007, we work with governments, NGOs and social enterprises to provide vulnerable and marginalised communities with information, inspiration, education and access to financial services.
Context is everything. Words and terms like handicapped, poor and third world were once commonplace in our field, used without any appreciation of the value judgements attached to them. Now we know better. Rather than describing what we do as providing services to the poor, we work with communities to build their capacity.
In India, your name alone can signify your religion, caste, and place of origin. Often, women carry their father’s name as their middle name, and have to change their name in marriage. Changing your name in this context becomes a political act, one that I embraced when I left home for college, and one which many Indian women embrace to be seen as separate from their families.
Our organization was founded by Gustav Praekelt in South Africa 2007 as the offspring of the digital marketing and design agency which also bore his name, Praekelt Consulting. The word Foundation was used to distinguish us from our for-profit sister company, but at the time it was hard to imagine that less than ten years later we would grow to be as large as Praekelt Consulting, running as many projects, staffed by a globally-distributed team with diverse backgrounds.
Now, the word Foundation no longer describes who we are. We operate entirely independently from Praekelt Consulting. The funding for our projects comes not from Gustav Praekelt or a generous endowment, but from partners like UNICEF, USAID, Johnson & Johnson, Ford Foundation and UNFPA.
As we embark on a new period in the growth of our organization the time has come to change our name to more clearly communicate who we are. Retaining the word Praekelt allows us to retain our heritage. While the addition of .org communicates our commitment to social change and our identity as an organization that develops digital technologies.
In addition to changing our name we’re also entering a new stage of development across our products and projects. This includes launching our first batch of sites built by our Free Basics Incubator graduates. We are expanding Tune Me – our youth sexual and reproductive health platform – to four new countries, and also recently launched the first chatbot for maternal health in Africa.
These projects represent the beginnings of the ambitious and innovative work we are preparing for over the next few years. By changing our name we have the opportunity to introduce or even re-introduce ourselves to existing and potential partners. We hope you take the time to get to know us again.
Since March 2015, Zelda Moran has worked with founder Peter Klatsky and an implementing partner, Baylor Uganda, on Mama Rescue: a cloud-based transport voucher and emergency dispatch system improving access to transport for mothers in rural Uganda. Deaths from common complications like hemorrhage, eclampsia, sepsis, and birth asphyxia, along with lifelong morbidities such as fistula are all preventable if mothers and their babies reach care quickly.
After hearing about the impact of Mama Rescue first-hand from from midwives and transport providers in May of last year, UNICEF and the Ugandan Ministry of Health decided that the Mama Rescue voucher platform should be scaled up and incorporated into FamilyConnect, a national eHealth program developed by UNICEF and Praekelt Foundation set to launch in 2017. Over the last few weeks, Praekelt, Moran, and the Mama Rescue team have worked together to explore how to scale this life-saving technology to the entire country of Uganda and even beyond potentially.
I asked Zelda to share how she became involved with Mama Rescue and her vision for its future.
“I’ve heard stories of women walking for hours toward health facilities until they finally give birth on the side of the road. I’ve heard stories of women who labor at home because transport is too difficult to find or afford. Now, I hear stories of women who call for transport as soon as they feel labor pains, and are referred to the hospital as soon as anything goes wrong.”
“We’ve always dreamed of bringing Mama Rescue beyond its pilot district of Kasese,” said Zelda, "and we have learned that they are a few key elements to successfully scaling technology.”
In the course of her work, Zelda has identified three keys to scaling technology in Africa:
Integrate with Existing Infrastructure
Users must be able to use tools that they already own and are comfortable with. Mama Rescue currently runs on existing MTN phone lines, and basic feature phones which people already own. Praekelt’s work on the South African Department of Health’s MomConnect platform helped enrol women from 98% of public health facilities across South Africa. The scale of MomConnect is largely enabled by integrating with ALL the country’s telecom companies, an important next step for MamaRescue. It’s important to be confident that the technology can be used by anyone with a phone anywhere with network coverage.
Leverage Existing Knowledge
Using language and vocabulary that health workers and patients are familiar with is vital to a health communication platform. Depending on the area, services must be translated into multiple local languages, and health workers must be able to use terms they are familiar with. As Praekelt Foundation rolls out its maternal health platform in Uganda early next year, it will be designed to work in areas where English is not commonly used, and even phone literacy may be low. Working with health workers and facilities to make the application relevant to their needs will require input and feedback. Designing HelpDesk functions and interactive motivational messaging programs for nurses will assist greatly in gathering this important information from local health workers.
Build Within existing systems
Mama Rescue uses boda-bodas (motorcycle taxis), special-hire drivers, and ambulances to transport mothers from home to health center, and from health center to hospital. We simply engaged the transport providers who were already serving the community and offered a better way for health providers and mothers to call on them. It’s important to remember that transport may look very different district by district, even town by town. Motorcycles may not be present in some areas, perhaps people use donkeys, horses, rickshaws, or exclusively cars. The technology must be adapted to solutions which people have already found.
Working with both the advantages and constraints of technology, health, and health-systems fields is both exciting and challenging, and the idea of a national scale Mama Rescue program is entirely different from our current single district project. Partnering with Praekelt Foundation will help make it a reality. When successfully integrated, Mama Rescue and Praekelt will work together to provide a system for connecting expectant mothers and families to valuable information about their pregnancies. All mothers in Uganda will have access to the information necessary for a safe delivery; Mama Rescue will handle the logistics.
The popular shoe brand Toms was founded in 2006 with the premise that for every pair of shoes you buy, they would give one to a needy person in the developing world. This sounded like the peak of corporate community involvement, until a few years ago when people realized their impact was more harmful than helpful. For one thing, the shoes took away from local businesses. Also, with the limited amount of shoes, children competed for pairs, creating tension and inequity amongst groups. Sometimes the best intentions produce unintended consequences.
In 2010, in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti, Alanna Shaikh – a blogger at Aidwatch – wrote a scathing commentary titled Nobody Wants Your Old Shoes: How Not To Help in Haiti. In it she declared, "Only the people on the ground know what's actually necessary; those of us in the rest of the world can only guess.”
This truth of this claim has showed itself time and time again in development efforts. International Development professionals striving to improve health and sanitation conditions in South Asia began a toilet-building campaign that recently culminated with Modi promising to build one million toilets in India. But despite this, many people still defecate outdoors, sometimes even close to a toilet. Unclean conditions, lack of education, and cultural and religious context contribute to the lack of usage.
Recognising that local organizations are sometimes best equipped to provide local solutions, we partnered with Facebook to launch the Praekelt Foundation Incubator for Free Basics. The idea of our Incubator is to provide organizations with tools and templates to create and publish their services to the mobile web – personalizing it to suit their needs and the needs of their beneficiaries too.
This is easier said than done. Mobile is not an easy medium to wrap one’s head around. It requires bite-sized content, clear call-to-actions, interactive features and, ideally, regularly updated content and service offerings. But, in a world in which there are more mobile devices than people, the potential payoff is enormous. Rather than playing catch up in the future, the Praekelt Incubator allows organizations of all sizes to tap into this opportunity now.
The graduates from our first batch of Incubator partners will launch their new services on the Free Basics platform this week, including She Inspires Her, a mentoring service for young female entrepreneurs in Africa, doctHERS which provides remote patient care with female doctors in Karachi, and Planned Parenthood’s site which brings localized sexual and reproductive health information to youth. And in the next few weeks we’re launching new services from organizations that provide information on everything from local education and literacy to rural development. By partnering with Facebook and publishing these services on the Free Basics platform we’re ensuring millions of people are able to access these new services for free.
Our Incubator program is the expression of two core beliefs at Praekelt: that the ‘people on the ground’ should be given tools to create their own solutions and that access to the internet is a basic right. Next, we’re opening our application process to find another 50 organizations to bring on board by the end of the year. If your organization could benefit from Free Basics and our Incubator program, apply here to work with us.
We hope to continue to use this initiative and others to discuss how free, universal access can be sustainable and scalable. Please comment and vote for our proposed panel on this topic for next year’s SXSW conference to take this conversation further.
Mobile integrations made easy – introducing Junebug
Since 2012, Praekelt Foundation’s open source mobile messaging platform, Vumi, has sent more than 100 million messages to tens of millions of people across the world, providing them with essential and potentially life-saving information. The journey has not always been easy, however.
Each time we launched Vumi in a new country, our engineering team had to grapple with the specific technical specifications for each mobile network operator (MNO). Managing these integrations became a full-time job in itself and the complexity of each new integration made it difficult to respond to urgent problems – not only for Praekelt Foundation, but for others too.
As the Ebola crisis demonstrated, integrating with MNOs is a cumbersome, time-consuming process and presents a significant obstacle to any organisation looking to develop and deploy mobile services at speed. The fact that aid agencies were unable to plug into mobile networks without first setting up integrations meant that it took far too long for vital information to be collected and disseminated via mobile.
For this reason, and for others, it became apparent that a new solution to integrating wth mobile networks was needed – a single platform that could simplify connectivity across networks, manage multiple data streams, respond to emerging data sovereignty laws and assure data security. Easy, right?
Birth of Junebug
In 2015, Praekelt Foundation worked with a select group of organisations – including the UNICEF Global Innovation Centre, Nyaruka and VOTO Mobile – to create a new open source server application, codenamed Junebug, to directly address these issues.
Junebug makes it simpler for software developers to build and manage mobile messaging services by providing them with a tool they can use to integrate directly with mobile networks. As the head of our engineering team, Simon de Haan, put it, Junebug is like an international travel adapter, allowing travellers all over the world to plug into different power outlets. Like these travel adapters, Junebug makes plugging into different mobile networks possible. This in turn means that organizations can send and receive millions of mobile messages more efficiently and quickly than ever before.
Simpler integration, multiple channels
Junebug enables software developers to integrate directly with local mobile network infrastructure. Direct integration gives developers full access to mobile network data and makes troubleshooting much easier as the source of any problem is easier to identify.
Prior to Junebug, software developers looking to add messaging and voice capabilities to their services, and the applications which run them, were required to develop and maintain different network integrations separately. On top of this, each application was custom-built for a specific messaging platform. Any tweak or adjustment required a code change for each communication platform, significantly reducing the pace of innovation and development.
Junebug solves this problem by providing software developers with an elegant HTTP API. Using the API, developers can quickly launch new integrations for their applications. The API exposes each integration’s capabilities in a standardized message format. It provides unified SMS and USSD gateway connectivity for integrators, operators and application developers. Not only that, Junebug also integrates with voice channels (for interactive voice services or live calls), WeChat, and Facebook Messenger and more integrations are in development.
Secure data
Junebug has also been designed to allow for local installations, ensuring that mobile messages are sent, received, processed and replied to as quickly and efficiently as possible rather than waiting for data to be routed to servers in other countries through the cloud. Instead, Junebug uses networks of local servers to distribute data and provide cloud-like services within a country.
Thanks to this unique feature, Junebug also ensures that sensitive data, like a patient’s medical record, remains securely within a country’s borders and that increasingly stringent data sovereignty laws are respected.
Junebug in action
The maternal health programs we support – HelloMama in Nigeria and MomConnect in South Africa – both now use Junebug to connect to mobile networks. All of our existing applications were moved seamlessly to this new software environment without any changes being made to applications or messaging formats. By standardizing much of the work involved in integrating with networks, Junebug also makes it much easier for applications to be re-used in new countries. Thanks to this, it’s possible for our team to launch our Maternal Health Platform in another country with minimal adjustment.
Learn More
Read more about Junebug here.
If you are interested in working on exciting new tech innovations, read about our open positions.
Behind all great technology platforms, user interfaces, and complex back-end systems lie dedicated people. As we expand our offerings and partnerships, we need exceptional talent and people who share our values. With this in mind, we created our Cape Town internship program in 2011 to provide graduates with an opportunity to experience our work environment and get to grips with our challenging projects. This year we had five interns working with our Engineering and Service Design teams in Cape Town.
Praekelt’s unique approach to software development, service design, and social change comes through in not only what we do, but how we do it. Engineering intern Wim Keirsgieter described the confidence he developed from the program: “It's shown me that taking bold steps is not half as daunting as it seems. It's also removed any doubt I might have had that software development is what I want to do.” The program reminded engineering intern Munsanje Mweene that “software exists to solve human problems. It is easy to lose sight of that while banging away at code.”
At Praekelt, small teams run large projects. “I'd heard the numbers, how many millions of people use platforms like Vumi and MomConnect, and it was pretty eye-opening to see that a team of only around 15 or so developers could maintain these projects,” Keirsgieter added.
We put people before positions at Praekelt, and our interns felt the difference. Kungela Mzuku noted, “I hear many stories about junior workers in companies and about how they're not valued, but Praekelt felt different. It made me realize I want to be in a place that cares for the people just as much as the work.” Munsanje Mweene, who interned in the engineering department, was pleasantly surprised by “the extraordinary patience and passion possessed not just by a few of the people at Praekelt, but the entire company. From the founder Gustav Praekelt himself to the junior developers, everyone was a living, breathing embodiment of the principles this company promotes.”
This was the first year the program included opportunities for Service Design interns. “As a relatively new field of design in South Africa, inspiring students about the possibility of a career in service design and increasing their knowledge and skills in human-centred design is essential,” said Lead Service Designer, Pippa Yeats, “The Service Design internship is about getting students from multiple disciplines – engineering, design and others – to learn to leverage their varied skills to design useful, usable and desirable technologies for social impact.” Interns had a chance to research best practices for nursing programs to provide recommendations for a new extension to the MomConnect platform in South Africa, and work on a human-centred design workshop guide for UNICEF.
Ultimately, everyone at Praekelt shares the goal of using technology to improve the wellbeing of people in resource-constrained environments. Speaking about her time at Praekelt, Kirsten Walker noted that “It made me very aware of the isolation that is created by a lack of information. It really highlighted that access to the most basic information has the ability to change many people's lives. The work Praekelt does made me want to pursue a career that makes a difference and looks at the bigger scheme of things.”
As Munsanje Mweene summed up, “Praekelt is a much needed dose of Good (with a capital G) and competence in a world that rarely pairs the two.”
If you’re interested in joining our efforts and being part of the team, read about our positions here. If you’re interested in interning, please write to [email protected].
Pilotitis [pahy-luht-ahy-tis] – the inability to break out of pilot stage.
The term, a coinage which has found widespread use the last few years, was frequently heard at the GSMA mHealth Summit in South Africa at the end of May 2012 when organisations and international development leaders spoke about how the difficulty in taking projects beyond the pilot stage was holding back mobile health in low and middle income countries.
The solution? Build for scale and sustainability from the start.
Fast forward four years, and we return to South Africa for the annual International AIDS Conference, where we are launching a bot for Messenger for the National Department of Health’s MomConnect platform.
Scale? The Messenger platform already has 900m users worldwide, and since Facebook opened the platform to bots and services in April, more than 11,000 bots have been added to the platform. Through the advent of Messenger and bots, messaging platforms have rapidly increased their potential to reach users with life-changing content.
Sustainability? Our new bot will provide mothers a more affordable, engaging way to access the stage-based messages currently provided by our technology’s SMS services, and Messenger allows for more generous character limits than SMS, with none of the time-outs of USSD. Users send 60 billion messages per day using messenger – more than three times the global daily SMS volume.
But scale and sustainability are not just relevant to the technology. The concepts also apply to users and content. In order to plan for scalability and universal access from the start, we prioritize the integration of content AND services. For example, when working with South Africa’s National Department of Health to build their maternal health platform, MomConnect, we - in collaboration with our partners at HealthEnabled - integrated HIV and PMTCT messaging into SMS content for pregnant mothers along a user journey that included clinic services and feedback on care. Users don’t just receive information passively - they interact directly with health care providers who are on the platform as well. Surveys and feedbacks on care, while occurring via mobile, impact the face-to-face future for mothers.
MomConnect content includes stage-based messaging on pregnancy, self-care for mothers, nutritional and cost-saving advice, and facts on sex and intercourse. By including HIV as a component of the platform, we created a way for relevant users to receive accurate information without creating an “HIV platform” which often stigmatises and turns away those most in need.
Over the course of the next year as we improve the level of personalized
information, mechanisms like the bot become vitally important: not just because of keeping costs down, but because they allow for more engaging ways to deliver content. While the bot is a work in progress as we continue to understand what the innovation is best for, it is a step in making the MomConnect service more financially sustainable, and more engaging to the women using the service.
If you were one of the estimated 20,000 people in Durban this week for AIDS 2016 you may have seen our General Manager, Debbie Rogers, deliver a demo of the first iteration of the MomConnect bot on Tuesday. If you missed it, you can also experience the demo of the bot first hand, by liking MomConnect’s Facebook page, where messages will be sent to users on an accelerated schedule for the conference.
Keep following our blog to learn how we’re using bots across our other projects.
As the Praekelt Foundation prepares for next week’s AIDS conference in Durban, I reached out to my friends from NGOs around the world. Having recently joined the comms team, I was hoping this would serve as an opportunity to connect like minded development people together, especially since HIV has been the central focus of most of my work in India and Nigeria since 2005.
Instead the responses I received were indifferent. One friend at an agriculture focused NGO said “We are hardly working in AIDS relief anymore.” Another wrote: “HIV is no longer in vogue! I don’t even think about it anymore. I used to be obsessed with it.”
I was surprised to see such a lack of interest in what continues to remain a large global health issue impacting millions. HIV today is the largest killer amongst adolescents in Africa, and the second largest worldwide. What happened to what was once the darling cause of the development sector?
For one, issues such as climate change and refugees have taken center stage in the media. Constantly debated, filmed, and discussed these crisis are on the front of newspapers and people’s minds. Within the cluttered media environment of ISIS, Syria, Zika, and Brexit, the lingering pandemic can’t always compete. There have also been huge strides in antiretroviral treatments and medical advances in the field which have enabled many people who are HIV positive to live longer and healthier lives. Yet, the conference next week will mark the 21st annual meeting on the subject, and there will still be over 20,000 participants. People still care and understand the importance of the issue.
When I was working on HIV, we spent a lot of time on creating work that was then handed off to other sectors. What I appreciate about Praekelt Foundation’s approach to health issues is their integrated, inclusive model. We believe all social issues, including HIV and AIDS, need to be contextualized, rather than approached as isolated issues. HIV is directly linked to sexual health, which is in turn connected education and literacy which is also directly affected by children and girls’ rights which undoubtedly has roots in poverty and access to resources. If we separate any of these facets, we do a disservice to all of them.
This philosophy will be the only way to achieve the 90-90-90 goals set out by the UN’s program on HIV/ AIDS in 2013. The strategy focuses on diagnosing affected people,offering antiretroviral treatment for people who are diagnosed, and having those who receive treatment be virally suppressed. The challenges will continue to be around access and availability of services and information, which is where mobile technology can be a game changer.
As communities become connected through the web and mobile data, issues will become harder and harder to isolate. This is a good thing as social change organizations can then mirror the reality of complex factors: problems don’t occur in silos. Then maybe every issue will continue to be addressed, even when they stop being trendy.
Praekelt Foundation’s Marcha Bekker travelled to Israel in April to take part in the inaugural Discovery Health Innovation Exchange trip. Read her first-hand account of this inspiring journey below.
The Discovery Health Innovation Exchange trip saw a group of South Africans entrepreneurs and innovators travel to Israel to meet with like-minded entrepreneurs who are changing the way the world approaches health, healing and wellness.
By sponsoring the exchange, Discovery Health wanted to achieve 3 goals: to expose South African entrepreneurs and organisations working in the health sector to new strategies and innovations; to create opportunities to partner with Israeli innovators and investors; and to inspire the South African teams to use technology in new, potentially ground-breaking ways.
In many respects, Israel provides the perfect environment for innovation. A culture of entrepreneurship and significant support and funding from the government have created one of the liveliest startup scenes outside the USA. The words chutzpah and tachles were heard often throughout the trip and help explain why innovators in Israel have been so successful. Chutzpah is the quality of audacity and tachles, roughly translated, means ‘get to the point’. Together these two words epitomise an approach to innovation that has given birth to 1,100 startups working in healthcare and life sciences in Israel – the most of any country in the world. Approximately 200 new medical device startups are founded in Israel each year, working in a diverse range of fields from medical engineering to biotechnology.
Over the course of the week I met with a variety of local startups and tech innovators. Some of my favourites included:
Common Sense is a sensory pad that women wear during pregnancy to detect amniotic fluid leaks and provide early warnings of any potential problems.
DermaCompare developed a revolutionary skin cancer screening platform where they take pictures of your whole body, and then track changes over time to spot early signs of skin cancer.
PrePex is the world's first non-surgical adult male circumcision device. No cutting, no stitches, no blood. They are conducting trials in South Africa, partnering with the National Department of Health and five local NGO's.
We also visited "Save a Child's Heart" – an NGO that sponsors and performs heart surgery on children who cannot afford those surgeries. About 50% of the children operated on, are Palestinians, and about 40% of them are from Africa. We met the head surgeon who told us his only "reward" he get for this work is a free cellphone. :)
At the Sheba Medical Centre and R&D Centre for Medical Robotics we saw robots that would allow doctors to perform surgeries or consult with patients remotely. Whilst in the hospital in Jerusalem we connected, via iPhone, to a robot in the United States – sending it to various parts of a medical ward in a hospital in the states, looking at things like heart rate monitors, radiology scans, etc.
It wasn’t all work, fortunately. The South African team travelled across the country, visiting the mountains of Haifa, the buzzing city of Tel Aviv and the enchanting old city of Jerusalem. Personal highlights included the Wailling wall or Western Wall, Mount Masada and the Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem.
Thank you to Discovery Health, as well as tour organisers, LINK, En-Novate, Promised Land Tours, and to my fellow entrepreneurs, innovators, and passionate-people-in-the-SA-Health-sector! This truly was a trip of a lifetime and I returned inspired and reinvigorated.
Facebook ushers in a new age of mobile services – and Praekelt Foundation is along for the ride
Today at the F8 Facebook Developer Conference, Mark Zuckerberg announced new additions to Facebook Messenger—and Praekelt Foundation will be one of the first organizations in the world to make use of them.
Praekelt Foundation will create its own chatbots for Facebook Messenger, ensuring that people living in the developing world are able to take advantage of this latest innovation from Facebook. We’ll be providing essential information and services to millions, at a fraction of the cost of traditional mobile messaging campaigns.
Facebook Messenger’s chatbots – programmes that allow for users to receive automated responses to questions as if they were interacting with a human – will allow users to interact with software programmes in a conversational style, asking questions and receiving immediate answers. Today, Facebook announced that it was providing developers with API tools to build their own chatbots, but Praekelt Foundation has already been working with Facebook for several weeks to develop our own chatbot. Attending the F8 conference on behalf of Praekelt Foundation, our Chief Engineer Simon de Haan was there to show off an integration that would allow pregnant women and new mothers to interact with a chatbot that provides vital health information to improve the wellbeing of mothers and their babies.
Mobile technology has made it possible for Praekelt Foundation and its partners to deliver vital information to more than 100 million people in over 36 countries. Thanks to our mobile messaging platform, Vumi, more than 800,000 pregnant women in South Africa have received over 40 million text messages with tips and advice that allow recipients to make better, more informed decisions about their health. While the cost of sending text messages has dropped significantly, in large volumes, they present formidable costs to any government or international NGO engaging in mobile messaging campaigns.
As smartphone penetration increases in South Africa and the rest of the developing world, however, messages that are sent via the internet – IP messages – offer up a chance to send and receive information more affordably. Facebook Messenger is used by more than 900 million people every month. The popularity of Facebook Messenger and other IP messaging apps like Whatsapp and Line demonstrates the power of IP messages. However, the announcements by Facebook today mean that businesses and social change organisations like Praekelt Foundation are in a position to make use of IP messaging apps in an entirely new way, using them to do more than just send and receive messages. Praekelt Foundation will now be able to provide users with access to a chatbot that can engage in conversations to provide relevant, on-demand information in an engaging way. The “Structured Messages” that chatbots will provide as part of their responses to users will also include information such as titles, images, URLs, and calls-to-action, allowing us to create an even more interactive, meaningful experience.
Praekelt Foundation’s open source mobile messaging platform, Vumi, is one of the first technologies to integrate with the Facebook Messenger APIs. From today, any Vumi application – any messaging interaction or campaign – can now be accessed through Facebook Messenger.
"The potential to use natural language as an interface has been receiving increasing attention recently,” said Praekelt Foundation founder, Gustav Praekelt. “With this announcement from Facebook and with similar projects from Microsoft and other technology companies, messaging platforms are now providing ordinary users with a chance to access information in an entirely new way.” Rather than relying on users to have familiarity with the conventions of internet searches, these chatbots have the potential to provide new internet users in the developing world with much more intuitive ways of accessing and engaging with information and services. And Praekelt Foundation is proud to be at the forefront of these developments.
Praekelt Foundation is releasing all of the work it has done to create our maternal health chatbot. The source code for the Facebook Messenger integration is available for developers to access at https://github.com/praekeltfoundation/vumi-messenger. The documentation is available at http://vumi-facebook-messenger.readthedocs.org/
Want to know how your organisation can use Facebook Messenger? We’d love to hear from you. Send an email to our chief engineer, Simon de Haan at [email protected]
Join us to improve the lives of mothers and children in Nigeria by becoming our VAS partner.
Request for proposals (RFP): Value Added Services (VAS) partners for mHealth Maternal Health Demand Creation Project in Nigeria.
Praekelt Foundation invites proposals for Value Added Service (VAS) partners who can provide the mobile platforms and associated connectivity for our mHealth project, Hello Mama, in Nigeria.
Hello Mama is an initiative which aims to improve Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (MNCH) behaviours and health outcomes in Nigeria through a demand generation mobile health program which delivers age and stage based voice and text messages to pregnant women, mothers and household decision makers.
Praekelt Foundation seeks responses from Value Added Service (VAS) providers/ aggregators who can provide the mobile platforms and associated connectivity required to deliver our technical specifications as a managed service. Respondents are advised to familiarise themselves with the technical and business requirements sections prior to responding to the RFP.
Respondents must submit their RFP responses by 20 April 2016 via email to [email protected] You can find the Request for Proposal, and all supporting documentation that needs to be downloaded here.
Since we first came across Wagtail we've been impressed by the work done by our friends at Torchbox. They've built an exceptional product and have been doing great at accepting contributions from the wider open source community.
Wagtail is our CMS of choice for the Praekelt Foundation Incubator for Free Basics and we were delighted when we were able to partner with Torchbox on this project earlier this year.
The core Wagtail CMS team stretches from the UK to Australia and New Zealand. They've been working together for close to 2 years now. Over the last few months we've been entertaining the idea of enabling the core team to come together for the first time.
And it's happened! We're really pleased to have helped Tom, Matt and Karl from Torchbox UK, Josh from Springload in New Zealand and Tim from Takeflight Australia meet face to face for the first time! They're sprinting with our Molo team this week in Cape Town. Molo is a platform that allows any organisation to deliver rich, interactive content to mobile phones in low-bandwidth environments. It is built using Django and Wagtail.
Tom Dyson, Torchbox's Technical Director, said "It's amazing for us to meet Josh and Tim in real life, having collaborated with them online across timezones for nearly two years. Github, Slack and Google Hangouts are fantastic tools but something different happens when we're in the same physical space, and we're already feeling the benefits. It's also been great for us to see Praekelt's work first hand - Molo is a very impressive project and we're so pleased that Wagtail is a part of it."
Yesterday we had a show and tell session to see what is being done with Wagtail, both by Praekelt Foundation and by other Wagtail teams worldwide.
Following the show and tell session we've outlined the following items that are going to be worked on the over the following days:
Translations
Our sites are always offered in a number of languages other than English. This means that we need support for fantastic translation work flows in the CMS. Since we often deal with medical information, this content needs to go through a strenuous review process. Our team at Praekelt Foundation has built an initial prototype implementation of translations in Wagtail which met our needs. This initial work is now helping shape the direction for official translation support in Wagtail CMS. We're proud to be able to contribute to this important work.
React Native, Wagtail APIs
We recognise that the mobile landscape is changing rapidly and we're charging ahead in preparation. Josh has shared (and open-sourced) a demo of a React Native application that connects to the Wagtail API to retrieve the relevant pieces of content.
This is important work for us, data coverage is a major barrier to entry to health workers across the developing work. An Android phone is great but if one is without data coverage most essential information still remains inaccessible. We're excited about the prospect of being able to enable community health workers to take essential and current content offline with them as they visit clinics and patients.
Content Workflows
We want to be sure that the content we provide is the absolute best content available. This means that most of our medical content needs to go through a process of review and approval. This ties closely to translations, each of which needs to go through the same process. We're looking at making a workflow process pluggable for Wagtail CMS. Making it optional for the situations that call for it but staying out of the way for situations where it is not needed.
We're excited for the week ahead and to spend time with like-minded developers in Cape Town whilst improving the open source Wagtail offering.
This blog post was written by Simon de Haan, Praekelt Foundation's Head of Engineering.
It’s been a busy year – highlights from 2015 from Praekelt Foundation
As is often the case this time of year, the team at Praekelt Foundation has been spending the last few weeks reflecting on everything we’ve accomplished in 2015. We’re grateful for all of your support and encouragement over the last 12 months. Thanks to you and our committed and hardworking partners we’ve made great strides in our mission to use technology improve the lives of people living in the developing world.
Maternal health at scale
The National Department of Health’s MomConnect platform is now serving over 700,000 pregnant women in South Africa in more than 95% of clinics across the country. Thanks to our collaborators USAID, Johnson and Johnson, MAMA, Baby Center, ELMA Foundation, HISP and Jembi Health Systems, hundreds of thousands of women who are preparing to give birth in 2016 have the power to improve their health in the palm of their hands.
Connecting youth across the globe
With every year that passes, our youth engagement platform continues to grow and mature. In 2015, we worked with the National Department of Health and WitsRHI in South Africa to launch B-Wise. With the support of the UNFPA and Ford Foundation, we launched Tune Me in Zambia and Malawi. With Girl Effect, we’ve launched mobisites for vulnerable girls in more than 30 countries in over 15 languages. Through our youth platforms, we deliver essential information to young people, equipping them with the knowledge they need to make healthier choices, support from their fellow users and links to vital services.
Accelerating access for millions
Just last month we announced a partnership with Facebook to create an incubator programme that will provide 100 social change organisations with the tools and support they need to build online services for feature phones in low-bandwidth environments. Already, more than 10 million users have visited the sites we’ve created for UNICEF, MAMA, Malaria No More and Girl Effect on the Free Basics by Facebook, but with the incubator, and the tools we’ll develop with our friends at Torchbox, we’ll expand the range of life-enhancing services available to millions more.
Unlocking the power mobile messaging
Since 2012, Praekelt Foundation’s mobile messaging platform, Vumi, has been used to send more than 100 million messages to over 10 million people. This year, with the support of UNICEF Innovation, we’re amplifying the reach and impact of Vumi with a new project codenamed Junebug. Junebug is a messaging gateway which connects governments, NGOs and enterprises to local mobile network infrastructure, allowing them to send and receive millions of mobile messages faster and more efficiently than ever before.
A time for new beginnings
We’re immensely proud of what we’ve achieved this year and in the history of our organisation. Over the last 5 years, Praekelt Foundation has grown from a team of seven people working mostly in Johannesburg, to an organisation of over 40 people working in 6 offices across 4 continents. Next year is set to be a landmark year and we’re excited to be sharing some new developments in early 2016.
Praekelt Foundation is proud to announce the launch of a new partnership with Facebook to support developers and social change organisations in their efforts to build accessible online services designed by and for people living in the developing world.
Together with Facebook we’re creating an open source toolkit of technologies and strategies that will empower organisations across the globe to adapt existing services and to create new ones, allowing them to distribute these services through the web and the Free Basics by Facebook platform.
To launch this initiative, Praekelt Foundation is creating a programme, the Praekelt Foundation Incubator for Free Basics, that will provide support and resources to 100 independently-selected social change organisations. The tools and lessons that emerge from this incubator programme will be opened up to the public in 2016 to allow thousands more organisations to take advantage of the ubiquity of mobile devices and the potential of the internet to create sustainable change.
You can register your interest to join the Praekelt Foundation Incubator for Free Basics now or read below for more information.
Praekelt Foundation believes that access to essential information and basic services is a human right. When people have access to the tools and knowledge that the internet and other digital communication technologies provide, they have access to opportunities that will make life better for everyone.
Over the last year, we’ve worked with UNICEF, Girl Effect, the Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA), Baby Center and other NGOs to provide more than one billion people, many of them first-time internet users, with free access to potentially life-saving information via Internet.org and the Free Basics platform. Since the launch of the platform just under a year ago, the sites and services we’ve created with our partners have been accessed by more than 10 million people in over 29 countries. We’ve never seen our work reach so many people so quickly, but we need to do more.
Through the creation of the Incubator programme, we will provide an additional 100 social change organisations with tools, service and support that are worth a total of $200,000, co-funded by Praekelt Foundation and Facebook. This investment will, however, also benefit many more organisations than just the initial 100 members of the Incubator programme.
The documentation produced by Praekelt Foundation, with support from our friends at Torchbox, will also allow other developers to add to and augment the open source technologies we create and adapt.
To inspire organisations outside of the incubator, the journeys of each of our partner organisations will be recorded and published as instructive case studies, through a community-driven blog. By sharing the stories and lessons of our partners in the Incubator we hope to create a supportive network of organisations from across the globe, working together to expand the potential of the Free Basics platform.
Praekelt is working with a broad range of experts from the fields of international development, user experience, mobile technology and digital safety and security to create an independent panel that will be responsible for selecting the members of the incubator from an open call to developers, social enterprises and NGOs.
Selected by this independent panel, the organisations joining the incubator will be provided with access to:
Tools and Technical Support
Partner organisations will be given access to a specialised, open source content management system (CMS) that will provide users with a powerful, intuitive and elegant interface to create and structure content. With the support of the Wagtail CMS’s creators, Torchbox, we will build features and tools that are designed to make content accessible to first-time internet users, particularly those using low-end feature phones in resource-constrained environments. This new system will allow organisations to manage and publish feature-rich content and services in multiple languages on the Free Basics platform. For a 12-month period, beneficiaries will also enjoy free hosting and technical support.
Content Development
Praekelt Foundation will work with incubator partners to help them analyse and adapt their existing content in order to ensure it is: suitable for delivery via Free Basics; engaging to end users; and geared to deliver impact. Where necessary, Praekelt will guide partners in the creation of new content and services which take advantage of some of the unique features of the Free Basics platform.
Capacity Building & Leadership
The team at Praekelt Foundation will work closely with the selected partner organisations to train them on the use of the publishing platform and a host of other tools they’ll need to shift or scale up their work from offline to online, digital to mobile. In addition, Praekelt Foundation will design and facilitate two workshops, one in India and one in South Africa - to empower the leaders of the 20 the most promising incubator partners. These workshops will connect them to industry leaders (CEOs, thought leaders, ecosystem evangelists, social change leaders and others) and support the development of their Free Basics offering, with a focus on designing impact measurement strategies.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, recently launched by the United Nations, commits countries around the world to provide Internet connectivity for all by 2020. But connectivity isn't an end in itself. It’s what people do with it that matters. By working with social change organisations and empowering them to leverage the Free Basics platform, the Praekelt Foundation Free Basics Incubator will help increase the rate at which connectivity is translated into real impact for people and their families.
If you think you or your organisation has information or services that could improve the lives of those who are currently excluded from the benefits of internet access then please register your interest to join the incubator here.
Praekelt Foundation launches a mobile-optimised youth platform in Zambia with the simple objective of saving the world. Kind of.
by Tamsen de Beer, Head of Content, Praekelt Foundation
The Law of the Few
Isaac Chunda heads up Ndola Youth Resource in Lusaka and is one of our partners on Tune Me, a brand new mobile platform for youth in Zambia. He laughs hard when he finds out that Tune Me is South African slang. He says: ‘Hahahhaah! We used to use that phrase when I was in school ten years ago! Now it’s a famous phrase used by our modern youth to mean tell me!’
Famous in Durban, Jo’burg, Cape Town north of the boerewors curtain - and also in Zambia, even 2933,5 kms further north? What a journey for two little words! How did this happen?
In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell compares the dissemination of information within cultures to the spread of epidemics. He presents a metaphor between social and pathogenic epidemics. But all epidemics need a mode of transmission to spread. Gladwell's "Law of the Few" explains that a very select group of people is responsible for the "tipping" of almost all social epidemics. These three unique groups of people are special for their incredible abilities to communicate, teach, and persuade.
Was it just a few young people who carried these two words ‘Tune Me’ so far, to youth cultures in cities as different as Durban and Lusaka? We certainly believe that just a few persuasive voices can make a difference. We’re looking for a few more!
A Tipping Point
Tune Me launched in Zambia on October 5th in partnership with UNFPA and the Ford Foundation. It is accessible to anyone with an internet connection and a phone – from the most basic handset all the way up to the latest smartphone. Tune Me provides essential sexual and reproductive health and rights information to adolescents and youths and connects them to youth-friendly services and sexual health experts with real answers.
It has an urgent imperative: be the tipping point. The site must impact the choices made by young Zambians between the ages of 10 and 24. Globally, this age-group makes up one quarter of the world’s population. Their reproductive choices will shape future demographic trends.
The demographic dividend
The demographic dividend theory holds that when the share of the working-age population (15 to 64) is larger than the non-working-age share of the population (14 and younger and 65 and older), there is a boost in economic productivity. A country with both increasing numbers of young people and declining fertility has the potential to reap the demographic dividend. Due to the dividend between young and old, many argue that there is a great potential for economic gains. In order for economic growth to occur the younger population must have access to quality education, adequate nutrition and health including access to sexual and reproductive health.
Never in the history of the planet has there been a youth population that tips the scale like it does today. On one hand, the massive potential of an economic force young and strong enough to carry us into the future. On the other; very real challenges. And this is where Tune Me comes in: in Zambia alone, more than one in seven adults is living with HIV. Unwanted pregnancies, STIs including more HIV infections, child marriage and dangerous childbirth, sexual violence and transactional sex compromise the potential of our continent’s future workforce. It’s our obligation to find ways to reap the rewards of the demographic dividend.
...We’ll Tune You
Tune Me won’t use words like ‘demographic dividend’. It talks about love, sex and relationships in an open and honest way and invites readers to share their personal stories navigating this tough terrain. It starts a conversation that sparks a question that leads to an answer that could make all the difference to a few young people who could make all the difference to a few more. Can Tune Me be a tipping point? Stay tuned* to find out.
We’re excited to share that today saw the launch of B-wise!, a mobisite that puts the most important aspects of their health and wellbeing at the fingertips of millions of young South Africans.
The launch of B-wise! was announced by Health Minister Dr Aaron Motsoaledi at a special ceremony in Shoshanguve hosted by the National Department of Health (NDoH). It was also a chance to celebrate the the one-year anniversary of MomConnect, an NDOH project focused on improving care for pregnant women and their infants.
B-Wise! – whose name came out of a national competition – provides the country’s youth with the information, tools and support they need to live healthier lives. Under the slogan ‘Health at your fingertips’ the mobisite gives young people an opportunity to access health information on various topics such as sexual and reproductive health, mental health and substance abuse. In a demonstration of one of the key aspects of B-wise!, Dr Motsoaledi took part in a live chat with young people who are now able to register and connect with health and wellbeing experts on a regular basis.
Both B-Wise! and MomConnect are NDoH projects that are positively impacting the lives of millions of South Africans, demonstrating how the department is taking the lead in mHealth – not just in Africa, but across the globe. We’re proud to be the technology provider for both of these groundbreaking platforms that superbly demonstrate the impact and potential of mobile to improve people's lives.
Almost exactly a year ago, we launched MomConnect, a nationwide NDoH programme designed to improve the quality of care for pregnant women and their infants. MomConnect grew out of MAMA, a global public/private partnership aimed at delivering critical health information to women living in poverty. A year ago, MAMA was integrated into the MomConnect programme that also links women with the national pregnancy registry and enables real-time feedback about health services received and data connected to a woman’s health record. To date, over 500 000 pregnant mothers registered to receive messages through SMS according to the term of pregnancy up to a year after delivery. A key aspect of MomConnect is that it enables feedback around service delivery. The NDoH has responded to over 180 000 messages to the helpdesk, the majority of which are questions around maternal and child care.
Now comes B-wise! which is the official NDoH’s Adolescent and Youth programme, and another example of a Praekelt Foundation platform reaching national scale. B-wise! has its roots in Young Africa Live (YAL), which Praekelt Foundation launched in 2009 as a way of engaging young people about sex, HIV/AIDS, rape and gender issues in a lively, engaging and informative mobile web format. Over five years, YAL has been used by close to 2-million unique users in South Africa, with 56% of those aged 16-25.
“We’re absolutely thrilled that YAL has grown into B-wise! and is now being taken to scale through a national campaign spearheaded by our partners at the NDoH,” says Gustav Praekelt, founder and chairman of the Africa-based Praekelt Group.
“When we started YAL, we always hoped it would become part of an inclusive platform that ensures not just scale, but scale with real impact. Working with our partners, we’ve used YAL as a step-off to B-wise! It’s a mobile environment poised to effect sustainable change in the way that South African youths deals with their health and wellbeing.
“We have already seen how MAMA was able to integrate into MomConnect – and so become part of a bigger ecosystem that not only empowers expectant and new mothers by delivering and collecting information, but also integrates with the public health system. Both of these are great examples of how our open-source, global infrastructure can work with supply systems – like those at the NDoH – to improve the health and wellbeing of people in need.”
B-Wise! is built around a partnership between ourselves, the NDoH and Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute (WitsRHI). Partnerships with MTN and CellC allow for their customers to access the site completely free of charge. We expect partnerships with other Mobile Network Operators to follow.
B-Wise! is the latest step in our commitment to developing population-scale digital platforms that improve the lives and wellbeing of millions.
Praekelt named one of Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Africa 2015
We are proud to have been recognised as one of the Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Africa by Fast Company.
Seen by many as the world’s leading progressive business media brands, Fast Company’s annual Most Innovative Companies issue is widely regarded as one of the most important barometers of global business and innovation.
“To be recognised by Fast Company is a real honour for us,” comments Praekelt Group founder, Gustav Praekelt.
“Fast Company plays a significant role in giving a platform to leading enterprises and rising newcomers that are working in a progressive and innovative space. It is gratifying that our work is being seen alongside the most innovative in Africa.”
Over the past year, Praekelt has been keenly focused on a number of key projects.
MomConnect is a much needed mobile maternal health initiative implemented and managed in partnership with the South African Department of Health (DoH).
Universal Core, Praekelt’s open source platform for the publication, management and distribution of content in a variety of languages across multiple channels, is providing several life changing Free Basic Services on Facebook’s Internet.org in Zambia and Tanzania.
More recently, with the use of Stellar’s open-source protocol, Praekelt is working on a mobile wallet that allows people to save cash or airtime using Vumi, their messaging platform—think Whatsapp, but open source and designed for the developing world, with a focus on improving the economic security of girls in South Africa.
Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies issue (March 2015) is now available online here as well as in app form via iTunes, and on newsstands beginning February 17.
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