Cape Town — Covid-19 Connect, a WhatsApp service that provides users with relevant information to help make informed and effective decisions during the pandemic, was developed by Praekelt.org for South Africa, but the organisation's experience with digital health technology like MomConnect allowed it to gain the attention of the World Health Organisation.

In particular, we're rolled out in South Africa a service within the WhatsApp platform that's also available for free on USSD called HealthCheck which is essentially a screening tool that people can use to check their symptoms and understand whether they should be moving around as per regulations, if they should be self-isolating, if they should be tested or if they should seek care.

Since that launched we've had about just about a million users complete 1.5 million health checks and that's something we're going to be rolling out to other countries now that we've tested it here in South Africa as a tool that creates a feedback mechanism between citizens and the national department of health.

In South Africa, the service is available in five South African languages and we've certainly seeing through marketing how important it is to have things in these languages, but in other countries it's even more critical and so we work with ministries of health and out on-the-ground partners to translate into multiple languages before we launch.

We have interest from Bangladesh, Uganda and Ethiopia to do so but I'm sure most of them will start to take that on because it's turning into a really useful service in South Africa and as the pandemic progresses in each country, screening is going to become a critical tool more and more so I think it will be in demand by various countries.

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