In Namibia, the ‘Listen Loud’ campaign supported by UNICEF captured the ‘votes’ of youth through mobile phones – a low-cost, easily accessible method of communication.Votes were collected through free calls made to an interactive voice response system (IVR), tailored with three different language options. The technical expertise for this project was made possible by the IT expertise from Text to Change.

Text to Change presented at the UNICEF Western and Central African Region (WCARO) C4D Learning Workshop on campaign communication in Dakar from 3 to 7 May 2010. The overall theme of the energetic workshop was Communication for Development (C4D) programming for campaigns with a specific focus on integrated campaigns, child health days, and immunization and polio campaigns.

Donorland has been littered with pilot projects over the last ten years that took interesting technology and ideas and sought to make them work in the unforgiving African context. All too often they had little idea of what potential users actually wanted and once the funding ended, the water closed over them and that was that. There is now a second generation of ICT4D projects that seem to have learnt the lessons of these early failures.