In this issue:

Educating Ugandan girls (and boys) about sexual health through SMS
UNCTAD releases report on measuring ICT and gender

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Gender and Mobiles Newsletter
Volume 3 Issue 3

Educating Ugandan girls (and boys) about sexual health through SMS

A low-cost SMS service in Uganda is helping young people aged 12 to 18 learn about sex education. The SMS Helpline, provided by SchoolNet Uganda, allows girls as well as boys ask the questions about sexual health, contraception, HIV/AIDS and pregnancy they always wanted to know but were afraid to ask. This innovative service allowed users to send their query and receive an answer, all by SMS, and eliminates face-to-face embarrassment. By including boys, SMS Helpline is helping educate young men about what is often seen as â€˜female issuesâ€™ â€“ a good example of how targeting men as well as women in gender initiatives can help bring about social and cultural change.
Read more.

Photo credit: Jake Lyell/Alamy

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UNCTAD Report: Measuring ICT & Gender

This recent report from UNCTAD examines ICTs, including mobile phones, and gender-disaggregated statistics across sectors such as education and employment. The reasons why gender statistics are needed are also discussed. One of the report recommendations is to "promote data collection on multiple uses of mobile telephones" because of their increasing ubiquity globally.

Read more.

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Text to Change:
healthy pregnancy in Tanzania

Text to Change in Tanzania is a text messaging service that gives pregnant mothers and their families important information about a healthy and safe pregnancy â€“ including antenatal clinic attendance, malaria prevention, individual birth planning, and prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV/AIDS.

The service, which is free, has reached over 300,000 people and over 41 million SMS have been sent.
Text to Change recently released this video, which tells some of the success stories it has had.

Watch the video.

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Belgacom appoints first ever female CEO

Forward to Friend

For the first time in the company's history, Belgacom has a woman as its CEO, Dominique Leroy. Belgacom, the largest telecommunications company in Belgium which includes the mobile network operator Proximus, is the only company on the Bel20 Index to have a woman in the highest leadership position.

Read more...

Learning from Failure: Addressing technical literacy for women + mobiles

GSMA mWomen Insights Analyst Elisa Minischetti provides a follow-up on the mWomen Design Challenge winner, Sahel Shake. Her blog post describes what happens when Sahel Shake (an app designed to help women use smartphones even if they have low technical literacy skills) is introduced into the Indonesian context. The failures experienced, while disappointing, still yielded important information that can further improve the app design and promote digital inclusion for more women - and men - mobile phone users. Read more...

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Vodafone releases Connected Women report

The Vodafone Connected Women Report has found that giving women greater access to mobiles and mobile services could increase the annual global productivity by over $20 billion
a year.

Educating Ugandan girls (and boys) about sexual health through SMS

UNCTAD Report: Measuring ICT & Gender

Text to Change: healthy pregnancy in Tanzania

Belgacom appoints first ever female CEO

Learning from Failure: Addressing technical literacy for women + mobiles

Text to Change:
healthy pregnancy in Tanzania