9: The percentage of South Africans between the ages of 15 and 24 that are HIV positive.

One in ten: The number of South Africans who own a landline.

105%: The cell phone penetration rate amongst South African youth.

25.6 million: The number of local MXit users who are in the 15-26 age bracket.

To most of us, these statistics seem unrelated, but for Katherine de Tolly and Marlon Parker, they represented an opportunity to make counselling more accessible to South African youth in a medium that is both comfortable and familiar to them.

Katherine de Tolly currently heads up Cell-Life, a Cape Town-based company that provides counselling and vital health information to people infected and affected by HIV/Aids in South Africa. Cell-Life offers two distinct services, both of which can be accessed via MXit Cares, a special instant messaging mobile platform that is freely accessible and through which youth can engage in confidential chats with trained counsellors.

The first of these services is called RedChatZone. By offering live mobile counselling Mondays to Thursdays between 15:00 and 17:00, this initiative has already reached more than 21 000 people since its inception in 2009. The therapists are all trained by the National Aids Helpline, which, in South Africa, is free to call from a landline, but expensive to call from a cell phone. As a result, the chat service is a viable alternative to having to call the NAHL from a landline (which is also often within earshot of others).

As a second service by Cell-Life, ‘Red’ is an information portal that provides regularly updated HIV information to people. Users add the contact like they would any other, and by looking at the stats, it would seem that they do so in the droves: Since 2009, close to 60 000 individuals have added Red as a contact.

Marlon Parker, Founder of RLabs

HIV might be one of the country’s biggest social problems, but it is certainly not the only one. Marlon Parker is the founder of RLabs, a drug counseling service on MXIt. Due to Parker’s brother’s struggle with drugs, the cause is especially close to his heart.

Through the RLabs service called Angel, individuals have access to relevant and helpful drug addiction-related information, as well as to a live mobile counseling service via MXit. Angel has so far helped about 120 000 MXit users, of which 80% are between the ages of 13 and 25. According to recent surveys, the issues addressed include problems like stress, drug addiction, family and relationship issues. Angel is also available as a mobi site, for those who do not have access to MXit. What’s more, this RLabs initiative was selected as a finalist for the 2010 Bees Awards, in the category of the Best Use of Mobile – a huge honour and a sign of the project’s social value.

So, programmes like RLabs and Cell-Life are clearly reaching thousands of South Africans a day, causing somewhat of a revolution in mobile counseling. The benefits? Well, there are a few:

• Affordability. Typically, data costs are around $0.01 per counseling session.

• Privacy. Since youngsters already spend a lot of time on their mobiles, nobody needs to know when they are chatting to a counselor.

• Efficiency. Once counselors have been trained to understand ‘SMS language’, they can speak to numerous clients at once.

• Effectiveness. According the National Aids Helpline statistics, about 80% of the calls it receives are hoaxes. With mobile-based counseling, this number has decreased drastically.

But what are the challenges to this infantile project?

• Bandwidth. “On World AIDS Day last year, thanks to some advertising done, there were over 1,000 people waiting. This ended up crashing [our] system,” says de Tolly.

• Human resources. The number of counselors is still too low to support the growing need for services like these.

• Funding. Since these projects are not-for-profit, financial support still remains an issue.

However, despite these setbacks, it remains certain that mobile-based counseling is set to impact the social landscape in South Africa in a very tangible way. To find out more about how you can help this worthy cause, contact Marlon Parker of RLabs here.

Hannah Moore is a freelance journalist based in Cape Town, South Africa.

How can I get MXit?

1. On your mobile phone, go to http://m.mxit.com
2. Download and install MXit
3. Register for MXit
4. Start chatting!