The mobile social web

From the latest edition of NGO Pulse, the SANGONet newsletter http://www.sangonet.org.za/

Trina DasGupta, mobile marketing consultant at loveLife, reports on the “Make Your Move” Campaign, which is helping young people “build personal initiative, strengthen their ability to negotiate day-to-day pressures, and find new links to opportunity”. An integral part of the campaign is MYMsta, the worlds’ first cell phone-based social network dedicated to youth empowerment and HIV prevention. Click here to read the full article.

Extract from article:

“loveLife - South Africa’s national HIV prevention programme for youth – has launched the “Make Your Move” campaign, designed to help young people build personal initiative, strengthen their ability to negotiate day-to-day pressures and to help find new links to opportunity. An integral part of the “Make Your Move” campaign has been the creation of MYMsta - the world’s first cell phone-based social network dedicated to youth empowerment and HIV prevention. loveLife has always recognised the importance of peer-to-peer networks in HIV prevention work. loveLife’s groundBREAKER and Mpinshti programme form a youth service corps of 6 000+ peer educators that reach over 500 000 South African youth every month with direct face-to-face interaction. Although nothing can replace that interaction, MYMsta is designed to complement loveLife’s physical network with an inexpensive and easily accessible virtual network, as the proliferation of cell phones in South Africa allows for peer-to-peer education to happen on a much larger scale. (75 percent of 15-24 year olds in South Africa own mobile phones, and 60 percent report using them every day, whereas only six percent of all South Africans have access to the Internet via computers.)”

Now that’s a social network!