April 2023 — “It is a really great website. My favourite part is [that] it has information for adolescents and young people, for caregivers. I think it’s really good and I’ll be using it.” These are the words of young Wilson from Zambia when he discovered the new Internet of Good Things (IoGT) site. By connecting to one of the 13 IoGT sites in the region, adolescents and young people like Wilson, their parents or caregivers, as well as key frontline workers, gain access to localised, up-to-date, quality content directly on their mobile phones at any time for free.

In 2022 one key process enabled UNICEF Country Offices to make an even stronger use of the digital platform. Having the financial support of the Office of Innovation supporting Easter and Southern Africa and South Asia regions, allowed various countries to release IoGT v2.0. Alongside a fully renovated design, new v2.0 features were built to support a diverse set of programme needs including a powerful set of customisation tools to match the platform to individual programmes, new monitoring and evaluation features, and the ability to download IoGT content for offline browsing.

The results followed soon after the launch of the updated platforms – there is an increasing trend in the number of users that turn to IoGT for information and guidance. Some country offices have also decided to focus their sites more closely around the needs and interests of adolescents and young people, which are now estimated to be 59% of all site visitors.  

In the meantime, the different IoGT teams have started receiving testimonials and feedback about the information they access on the sites. User experience surveys from Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Rwanda, South Africa and Zambia show that most users (61%) strongly agree that they enjoy using the site, with about half of the visitors indicating that the information is easy to find and useful. 

Young people in particular point out to entrepreneurship and skills-building as a top priority and look at IoGT as one credible source of information and guidance. Mental health appears to be no different – although there are plentiful mental health resources available on the internet, young people would like to know how they can access local mental health and counselling services in their town and believe that IoGT could be a great platform for that. The caregivers and professionals are also growing supporters of IoGT as a tool they can use in their work, engaging adolescents and young people with relevant and interactive content on sensitive topics such as sexual and reproductive health. (More insights can be found in the human-interest stories, part of the human-centred design research conducted in 2022.) 

A success story is also evident in the case of U-Report. Adolescents and young people in Eastern and Southern Africa are increasingly using this platform to get their opinion heard, stay informed and shape a more safe, participatory, and empowering future for themselves and their peers. U-Report plays an important role in promoting two-way communication and engagement with adolescents and young people. Personalisation, such as responses to individual questions, is a strong motivator for continued engagement. UNICEF identifies issues that affect adolescents and young people by collecting their insights to improve policy and programmes, and by directly providing life-saving information to the most vulnerable in a timely way.

UNICEF ESAR has 14 countries using the platform and has registered 3.7 million U-Reporters registering tremendous growth of 31.66 % as of February 2023.  

Mozambique is one of the countries in ESAR with top users currently at 796,042 reporters as of April 2023. The SMS BIZ/U-Report team launched an invitation system to promote the free and personalised counselling service on sexual and reproductive health and HIV prevention for adolescents and young people. An already registered U-reporter can further invite a friend or family member to complete the registration on the platform. The campaign was truly successful and has led to a faster scale of usability and reliability of the platform by producing results faster. This has also seen a reduction in market costs, helps to build, and strengthen existing youth networks and allows opportunities to leverage existing messaging channels in a strategic and innovative manner.