Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2008. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - October 17, 2008
Claire Keeton
Project Masiluleke, or Project M, aims to send out 365 million message on cellphones about HIV/Aids and TB during the year it will run.
The messages are sent with the free Please-Call-Me text messages, about 30 million of which are sent per day.
"As far as we know it's the first time this space has been used for HIV messaging," says Marcha Neethling of the Praekelt Foundation, one of Project M's partners.
MTN is another partner and the telecoms company has donated space for about a million of the Please-Call-Me messages a day to the campaign.
The concept was born at Pop!Tech, an annual ideas and social network summit in the US, and it was unveiled on Friday in the US and South Africa.
The project aims to harness mobile technology to connect people to counselling, testing, care and treatment.
The Praekelt Foundation developed the "Social.Txt" open source technology and iTeach is providing the content of the messages.
Project M has been designed so that it can be scaled up and expanded worldwide.
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