The 24-hour-service, the first of its kind in East and Central Africa, offers information not only in English and Kiswahili, but also in vernacular languages like Kikuyu, Kamba, Luhya and Luo.

Known as Interactive Healthcare Solutions, the service is now aiding adolescents or even adults get answers, in confidence and privacy, to questions they fear asking their parents, healthcare providers or peers.

Issues considered controversial and improper such as sex, condoms, and venereal diseases, can now be answered just at the press of the button. With the service, callers are able to tell what is ailing them even before consulting a doctor.

Paddy Mwangi, who developed the programme in fulfillment of his masters degree thesis at the University of the West of England in the UK, says he decided to put his theory into practice after it won an award and a lot of accolades from Worshipful Company Marketors of London.

And two months since the service was launched, interesting statistics have started trickling in. Over 420 people have managed to call and listen to the health information being offered.

Most of those who have used the service so far are aged between 15 and 25 years and are residents of either Nairobi or Mombasa.

Statistics also show that majority of the callers are women who are interested in knowing more about sexual health issues. While men who have called so far are interested in issues to do with drinking habits.

According to 24-year-old Mwangi, the idea, which he patented last year, is likely to benefit many Kenyans, especially the youth, who fear consulting hospitals or dispensaries when infected with sexually transmitted diseases.

Or those having drinking, smoking or drug abuse problems.

“Using this service a person can self diagnose himself or herself by just listening to the information being provided. This empowers one to take appropriate steps.”

However, he is fast to add that they also tell their clients that they are not a medical helpline, and their information should not be used as a basis for self-medication.

Consequently, they request those affected to seek further medical help from an expert.

Jane Kinyanjui, who has used the service, says besides providing information on STI’s, the most exciting aspect of the service is getting it in her mother tongue, Kikuyu.

“Conveying the message in my own mother tongue is very powerful because I identify with it. I also believe it will be helpful to those who cannot understand English or Kiswahili.”

With this service, only what a person is required to do is dial a number corresponding to the type of disease or condition he or she wants information about. Each call is charged at Sh 5 per minute.

Once the number is dialed, one is directed on how to access this information in any of the languages they are comfortable with. Each of the diseases or habits such as drinking or drug abuse has been assigned its own number.

On sexual health category, for instance, information on gonorrhea, syphilis, genital herpes, condom and its usage, and emergency contraceptives, is provided in both English and Kiswahili and the four vernacular languages.

If a person wants to know about sexually transmitted infections, he or she will dial 0900-331-101 and all the STI’s, including HIV will be listed.

Choosing one disease leads a person to listening to an interactive conversation between a patient and a doctor, with the latter answering questions raised by the former on the causes, symptoms, and management of the disease.

At the end of the conversation, the caller is asked to provide information about his or her age, sex and locality.

These features help to reroute the callers to appropriate sites and centres within their localities where they can get further medical assistance. There is a feedback provision where callers can ask intimate questions, and get answers within 48 hours.

A similar procedure is applied for those calling Drinking Helpline (0900-331-103), Smoking Helpline (0900-331-102), and Drugs Helpline (0900-331-104).

These help lines are designed to empower those having drinking, smoking and drug abuse problems with information on how to stop it and where to seek further professional assistance.

But it has not been bread and butter for Mwangi to get this far. It all started in 2004 when he carried out a survey to establish how confident people were when visiting centres such as Voluntary Counseling and Testing (VCT) and health care systems.

One of the key findings was that some people felt the centres failed to meet confidential standards because some of the providers knew the clients and could later leak the findings of the tests to other people.

With these findings, he decided to come up with a system whereby people would access sexual health and other information without having to see the person giving it.

“At first many people in both UK and Kenya dismissed the idea as impractical and asked me to reconsider it. But I believed something can come out of this,” he recalls the hard times he had to go through.

Determined, he decided in 2005 to against the odds and give it a try what he had conceptualized in 2004.

“The most painstaking aspect was to collect the critical information on the diseases and habits, and then put them in simpler form,” says Mwangi.

But the hard part was yet to come. Translating the diseases, especially scientific names into different vernaculars became costly and a nightmare. Every single word translated cost him Sh 9.

“Sometimes we had to repeat the translation three to four times to get the right meaning of the word in Kiswahili or that particular vernacular language,” he says.

He estimates the total cost of operationalising the idea to be over six million shillings.

“My father, Dennis Mwangi, has given me both moral and financial support that has seen me get this far,” say Mwangi, a first born in a family of three children.

Despite of all these challenges, he managed to complete the process.

The next step was to present the idea to Safaricom, Celtel and Telkom to see if they could buy into it and agree to host it. They granted his request for it was going to be a win-win situation for both of them.

---