October 2022 — The Eastern and Southern Africa region has around 268 million children and adolescents below 18 years of age, accounting for approximately 49 percent of the total population. Despite significant progress in protecting their rights, children and adolescents continue to suffer from multiple deprivations and undergo inadequate social and gender norms negatively impacting their full development. In recent years, serious climate-related crises and the COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated these deprivations, increased the risks of mental health conditions, and enhanced gender inequalities.

The UNICEF-led initiative – the Internet of Good Things (IoGT) offers an opportunity to expand remote access to emergency information on diseases, key resources on mental health, advice for sexual and reproductive health, and climate change issues to empower young people impacted by the digital divide. IoGT is optimized for use on low-end mobile devices and is free of data charges in several countries thanks to zero-rating partnerships with mobile network operators. During the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, IoGT has supported the delivery of high-quality content to address stigma and mental health issues for young people and their caregivers at scale. The platform has also been used to engage frontline workers and gather social and behavioral insights into their experiences which have been used to tailor vaccination strategies.

Building on the best practices of IoGT use in the COVID-19 response, the project “Scaling-up Internet of Good Things for Social and Behaviour Change in Eastern and Southern Africa and South Asia regions” launched in July 2021 with the aim to further support programme delivery at the last digital mile by scaling tailored content and engagement resources on the Internet of Good Things 2.0 version. With support from the UNICEF Office of Innovation, the project is led by ESARO SBC with ROSA and IoGT HQ and involves 12 countries in ESAR (Angola, Burundi, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe).

The "Scaling-up IoGT" project has enabled country offices to leverage the platform to support programmatic priorities, including MHPSS, gender, climate, etc. For 2022 World Environment Day, UNICEF Zambia organized changemakers workshops to amplify the voices of 40 adolescents and young people. By using IoGT, participants acquired a deeper understanding of key advocacy areas and developed storytelling skills which enabled them to co-create inspiring content for the IoGT platform and the country office social media packages. UNICEF Madagascar will officially launch the IoGT in November 2022 with a focus on empowering young people’s voices and capacities on topics related to climate change, mental health, and sexual health. 50 U-Reporters from Madagascar have already been trained on how to start a climate campaign using IoGT content in September 2022.

Thanks to the activities sparked by the project, more and more young people in ESAR and SA are being reached through the sites. A total of 5.5 million users and 7.9 million pageviews have been generated by September 2022. Good practices and user stories from participating countries are being documented and will be shared at the regional and global levels after the project closure in December 2022.