Award-winning YoungAfricaLive youth mobile community partners with Safaricom, now live in Kenya!

YoungAfricaLive (YAL) launches in Kenya today, adding substantially to the award-winning mobile community portal’s presence in East Africa which commenced when YAL Tanzania launched in December 2011.

In bringing the vibrant mobile community to Kenya, Praekelt Foundation has partnered with leading integrated communications firm, Safaricom. This partnership allows young Kenyans to share and discuss the issues they confront daily, via their mobile phone. 

YoungAfricaLive has already been launched by Vodacom South Africa and Tanzania- in Kenya it is now available through  Safaricom’s SafaricomLIVE portal on www.safaricom.com/wap. A 2005 study showed that 60% of Kenya’s unemployed are under 30, and where UNICEF statistics reveal 20 % of the population live below the international poverty line of US$1.25 per day.  In addition, research published by the World Bank indicates that 6.3% of Kenya’s popular of 40.5 million is HIV positive, many of those young people.

Says Safaricom’s Director of Corporate Affairs, Nzioka Waita, “This partnership is key to our digital inclusion agenda. We believe that the best way to improve the utility and therefore take-up of the internet among the youth of Africa and Kenya in particular, is by having relevant content on it and making it accessible to them. Being in the vanguard of the internet explosion in Kenya, we have the network to deliver YAL’s socially relevant and well-packaged message to as many young Kenyans as possible.”

Safaricom has invested heavily in bringing internet access to the Kenyan people. According to government data, nine out of every 10 Kenyans who access the internet regularly do so through the Safaricom network.

“To follow-up a very successful launch in Tanzania late last year with YAL Kenya is a great way to start 2012,” says Gustav Praekelt, founder of Praekelt Foundation. “We are confident that young Kenyans will embrace the mobile platform with the same passion that their South African and Tanzanian counterparts have and use it to create a community that informs, supports and entertains.”

Launched by Praekelt Foundation in 2009 in South Africa, YAL started out as a way of providing young South Africans with free access to information on HIV/AIDS through their mobile device. It has now turned into a community of engaged young people who use YoungAfricaLive to gain reliable information, discuss issues, have fun and gain the support and input of their peers

YAL South Africa, in partnership with Vodacom, already has an approximate 1 million unique users while YAL Tanzania (also in partnership with Vodacom) has already established a strong presence in the country with a steadily growing user base, since 1st December, 2011.

In 2011, Praekelt Foundation was acknowledged for the success of YoungAfricaLive by winning the Social Impact category of the 2011 Global Mobile Marketing Awards for Innovation, Creativity and Leadership in Los Angeles in November.

YoungAfricaLive is available to Safaricom subscribers in Kenya from January 23rd. 

For more, visit praekeltfoundation.org or follow us on Twitter at @praekeltfound

Award-winning YoungAfricaLive youth mobile Community launches in Tanzania

YoungAfricaLive launches on Vodacom Tanzania today, marking the start of the award-winning mobile community’s presence in East Africa.

Young Africa Live is a mobile community that entertains and educates young people on topics of love, sexual health, gender and relationships which are issues adversely affecting the youth in Tanzania.

The portal intends to give the youth a platform to speak their minds, through a medium that is accessible, and encourage conversations on topics that are relevant to them. This will then get the conversations going; ideas shared and internalized thereby creating behavior change around relationships, good love, safe sex and HIV. 

The platform will therefore empower youth to become catalysts for change, connecting them to Tanzania health care providers and create a new experience of what can be achieved by mobile internet as a platform.

Fittingly, YoungAfricaLive: Tanzania arrives on World Aids Day – two years to the day after YoungAfricaLive’s inception in South Africa where it has proved to be an potent way for young people to share and discuss the issues they confront daily. 

YoungAfricaLive: Tanzania is available free to Vodacom subscribers through the Vodacom Mobile portal http://m.vodacom.co.tz. This means that users are able to be on the YoungAfricaLive portal even if they don’t have airtime – a critical element in a country where one of the key millennium development goals is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.

“We are thrilled that our partners Vodacom have joined us in launching YoungAfricaLive in Tanzania,” says Gustav Praekelt, founder of Praekelt Foundation.

“Over the past two years, what started out as a desire to provide young South Africans with free access to information on HIV/AIDS through their mobile device has turned into a vibrant community of engaged young people who use YoungAfricaLive to gain information, discuss issues - and also have fun.”

Just recently Praekelt Foundation was acknowledged for the success of YoungAfricaLive in South Africa, which currently has over 656,000 users.  The Johannesburg based organization, Africa’s leading developer of mobile solutions to improve people’s lives, was named the first South African winner of the Social Impact category of the Mobile Marketing Awards for Innovation, Creativity and Leadership in Los Angeles in November 2011.

Over two years YoungAfricaLive has grown to become South Africa’s largest mobile community for young people – and with a substantial number of youth in Vodacom Tanzania’s over 10.5-million subscriber base, the uptake of YoungAfricaLive in this country is expected to be as significant.

YoungAfricaLive’s real power comes in providing a space where young Africans can talk about sex, HIV/AIDS, love, relationships, and, increasingly, jobs. 

“The fact is that through YoungAfricaLive and Vodacom, Tanzania’s youth can now get onto a mobile platform at no cost and get information on some very topical and important issues,” says Rene Meza, Managing Director Vodacom Tanzania 

“Most importantly, YoungAfricaLive gives users the opportunity to ‘talk’ to other young Tanzanians about the things that affect their lives the most – be it their lovelife or female genital mutilation.” Said Rene   

As we’ve seen in South Africa, this peer-to-peer conversation is incredibly powerful in changing people’s lives for the better and we are excited about giving young people in Tanzania access to this.

YoungAfricaLive is available free to pre-paid Vodacom subscribers from December 1st.

Praekelt Foundation scoops prestigious global social impact award

Praekelt Foundation has been named the first South African winner of the Social Impact category of the 2011 Mobile Marketing Awards for Innovation, Creativity and Leadership.

At a ceremony in Los Angeles last night on November 17th, the Johannesburg-based foundation was honoured with the Global Gold Award for its YoungAfricaLive project. 

“We’re really thrilled at the recognition given to YoungAfricaLive by this award,” said Praekelt Foundation’s Creative Director, Jonathan MacKay who was in LA to accept the award.

“We faced some intense competition from some really strong international projects doing great work,” added MacKay. 

“But the fact that YoungAfricaLive is recognised as having the most potent social impact is a real boost to the project, a credit to our partners and, really, an accolade that deserves to be shared with the whole YoungAfricaLive community whose passionate participation makes it the success that it is.”

YoungAfricaLive was nominated for the Social Impact category alongside Giorgio Armani and R/GA’s Aqua di Gio Armani Drops for Life App, Waterfall Mobile’s Waiting for ‘Superman’ Social Action Campaign and Busday and TELiBrahma’s Busday gets buzzier project.

Finalists in the 2011 Mobile Marketing Awards for Innovation, Creativity and Leadership represent the best-of-the-best in mobile marketing from across the globe.  

“The over 25% increase in submissions from all over the world is indicative of how mobile marketing is being embraced by major brand marketers everywhere as integral to their marketing mix, ” said Greg Stuart, Global CEO of the Mobile Marketing Association.

Hosted on Vodafone Live and available free to Vodacom users in South Africa, YoungAfricaLive is a community that shares and discusses critical issues facing Africa’s youth, including love, sex, relationships and HIV/AIDS.  It celebrates its second birthday on December 1st this year and counts over a six hundred thousand active users as part of its rapidly growing community. 

In October, a new addition to the YoungAfricaLive platform came in the form of Africa’s first mobile career opportunities social network, Ummeli. 

Since its launch less than a month ago, Ummeli has attracted over 20,000 active users, all aiming to take advantage of a supportive community of young jobseekers that can offer advice, suggestions, ideas exchange, connections and information on jobs, bursaries and grants. 

Winning the Global Gold in the Social Impact category of the 2011 Mobile Marketing Awards for Innovation, Creativity and Leadership follows on the heels of another recent Praekelt Foundation accolade. 

On October 26th, the Praekelt Foundation’s appointment reminder system for people on chronic medication, TxtAlert, was named the first winner of the Tech4Africa Innovation Award, created to encourage innovation in solving uniquely African problems whilst also encouraging global thinking.

YoungAfricaLive, Ummeli, TxtAlert and Project Masiluleke are all projects that embody Praekelt Foundation’s mission of building open source, scalable mobile technologies and solutions to improve the health and well-being of people living in poverty. Already, with the support of funders like Omidyar Network, programmes that have emerged out of Praekelt Foundation and its partners have reached over 50 million people across 15 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

Full YoungAfricaLive Youth Sex Survey poll results

Earlier this year Praekelt Foundation released the recapitulated results of a groundbreaking Youth Sex Survey, conducted on its YoungAfricaLive mobile platform, that gives fascinating insight into the sexual behaviour and beliefs of South Africa’s youth.

Following the interest in the results, Praekelt Foundation decided to make public the full poll results.

Based on over 50 revealing questions and over 138 954 frank responses, the YoungAfricaLive Youth Sex Survey reveals that whilst South Africa’s youth are unquestionably sexually active (44%), they have strong views on the role of HIV/AIDS in sexual encounters, and the survey showed that 81% of respondents think that South Africans are having sex too young.

Says Debbie Rogers, lead strategist for Praekelt Foundation: “The polls in this survey are often asked within the context of an article on the portal and are therefore an interesting indication of the potential for behaviour change that is inherent in the YoungAfricaLive portal. As the community continues to grow beyond the 450,000 strong members whom are currently on the portal we aim to investigate a number of alternative, more scientific, studies which will investigate the affects of the portal in promoting behaviour change in the users”.