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Stella Nayiga clutches her mobile phone as she describes the messages that she received punctually every morning and evening for over a year, reminding her to take her antiretroviral (ARV) drugs regularly. "The text messages would come twice a day and were saying things like 'Dear friend, please take care of yourself' and when you got them you knew it was time to take your medicine," Nayiga, 28, told AFP.
"As a human being you can always forget to take the drugs - maybe not for the whole day but sometimes for some hours - but this service really helps you to remember."
An HIV-positive health worker in the Kampala suburb of Kawempe, Nayiga was part of an innovative scheme that used mobile phones to help remind around 400 patients diagnosed with the virus to take their ARVs regularly. A collaborative project between a local clinic and a Dutch-run non-governmental organisation, the programme is part of an attempt in Uganda to harness the power of mobile technology to help fight HIV. Those involved say that it soon became clear that receiving the daily messages was a big help for the people taking the drugs.
"We saw that because of the mobile messaging there was a really tremendous improvement in adherence," said Samuel Guma, director of Kawempe Home Care, which runs the clinic involved.
ARVs - taken twice daily - require a minimum adherence rate of around 95 percent to be truly effective and the SMS scheme saw the number of people taking the drugs correctly rise from 75 percent to over 90 percent.
Sitting in an office in an upscale suburb of Kampala, Bas Hoefman, founder of the Dutch-run NGO Text to Change, the organisation behind the text messaging programme, lists the different ways mobile phones can be used to fight HIV.
Starting off in Uganda five years ago, Text to Change used SMS quizzes to try and educate people about HIV issues and encourage them to go for testing - sometimes offering incentives such as phone credit. Since then the organisation has run over 30 HIV-related projects using mobile phones across Africa, such as promoting medical male circumcision in neighbouring Tanzania - and has reached an estimated 1 million people in Uganda alone.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2012

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