A SOUTH AFRICAN instant messaging network which has often been vilified for aiding drug pushers is now being used to provide counselling for drug addicts and people with HIV.
MXit is an extremely popular peer-to-peer network in South Africa that runs on cellphones. People use it to chat to each other, and to connect to internet-based chat services such as Google Talk. MXit has 12.5 million users across the country, far more than the 4.5 million who have access to broadband.
The network鈥檚 popularity has meant drug pushers have used it to target schoolchildren. 鈥淭hey get constant bad press 鈥� like drug deals being made over it, and people getting kidnapped, stuff like that,鈥� says Paul Scott of the (UWC) in Cape Town. 鈥淲e decided to use that technology for good things,鈥� says Scott.
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About 10 months ago, Scott鈥檚 team was approached by , who was running the Drug Abuse Support (DAS) service in Cape Town. Parker needed help reaching more people, and Scott鈥檚 team had already worked on a software toolkit called , which takes its name from the framework of wooden poles erected to build a traditional African hut. With Chisimba you can build a web-based application quickly and easily. So Scott鈥檚 team combined Chisimba and MXit to build a portal through which anyone with a cellphone and a MXit subscription can chat to a counsellor just as if they were connecting to Google Talk. The request is handled by one of eight counsellors, who chat using their desktops from a DAS centre in the township of Mitchell鈥檚 Plain, Cape Town.
鈥淭his allowed us to reach more people than what we anticipated with very limited resources at our disposal,鈥� says Parker.
A team of moderators monitor the system and can prioritise urgent messages 鈥� for instance, from someone who is suicidal. 鈥淲ith a lot of these counselling sessions, people are talking to their counsellors while trying to commit suicide,鈥� says Scott. So far the counsellors have managed to prevent any deaths.
鈥淭his clearly proved to us that by using technologies such as the Chisimba framework and MXit, lives can be transformed if people are willing to use it for social good,鈥� says Parker. 鈥淭he service also supports a number of other social issues that southern Africa is experiencing.鈥�
Counselling is also being offered to HIV patients, who need information about, say, when to take their anti-retroviral drugs. Currently, the service is run by volunteers with support from the UWC, and is limited to the Cape Town region.
Scott, who the work at the recent O鈥橰eilly Open Source Convention in San Jose, California, hopes to get funding to extend the service nationally, and even across sub-Saharan Africa.
