Texting young women in Kenya with regular information about sex, contraception, and sexually transmitted diseases could encourage more to get tested for HIV in a country where stigma surrounding the virus is rife, researchers said on Wednesday, Reuters reports
Some 600 female college students in Kenya received monthly text message surveys about their sexual behaviour, and half were also sent weekly messages about HIV prevention, for a recent study by medical researchers and mobile research firm mSurvey.
Two-thirds of the 300 women who were sent the weekly texts said they got tested for HIV within six months of the study, while among those who received the monthly surveys, only half reported going to be tested for the virus, the study found.
A doctor and researcher at Nairobi’s Kenyatta National Hospital said that Young women across Kenya lack knowledge about HIV, but many have mobile phones and love texting
According to a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, a U.S.-based think tank, more than eight in 10 people in the East African nation own a mobile phone, up from just 10 percent in 2002
Speaking to Thomson Reuters Foundation ahead of World AIDS Day, Njuguna said that women like receiving health surveys by text message because it’s anonymous and they can do it at their convenience
Kenya has slashed its HIV prevalence rate among adults to six percent today from 11 percent in 1996, according to the United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).
