"In Cambodia and Burkina Faso, through the USAID Breakthrough-ACTION project, and in partnership with each country’s Ministry of Health, Save the Children, and Viamo have coordinated communication campaigns using Viamo’s 3-2-1 Service to quickly disseminate essential information related to COVID-19 nationwide, for free. In Burkina Faso, Save the Children and Viamo developed twenty-five key messages, including those addressing local misconceptions, a COVID-19 knowledge quiz, and a remote training curriculum for community health workers. The content was validated by the Ministry of Health, recorded in five languages (Moore, Dioula, Fulfulde, Gulmancema and French), and made available to anyone with a mobile phone simply by calling ‘321’. From March 26th, 2020 to May 20th, approximately 55,000 unique callers listened to nearly 280,000 key messages on the Service in Burkina Faso. In Cambodia, Save the Children and Viamo developed ten messages to promote understanding, prevention, and treatment of the diseases as well as an interactive audio game to test COVID-19 knowledge. The messages are were recorded in Khmer, pre-tested, and then finalized to be made available on the Service. Viamo’s MNO partner Cellcard is currently sending SMS messages to their 3 million subscribers to promote the content."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KLUTyDoJ94&ab_channel=The3-2-1Service

https://www.savethechildren.org

• Burkina Faso
• Cambodia

• Youth
• Children, Society

"The project is highly replicable. Viamo’s 3-2-1 Service concept can be replicated in any country where it is possible to partner with a national mobile network operator (MNO) and a content partner. Currently, the Service operates in 18 countries globally, and in 2019 reached 6.4 million listeners who listened to 67.5 million key messages. Recently, the 3-2-1 Service launched in both Niger and Indonesia, increasing the Service’s ability to reach millions more people. Save the Children can adapt the message content to local languages in any of the additional 16 countries where Viamo operates the Service. COVID-19 information can also continue to be added to the Service in Burkina Faso and Cambodia, as well as to the other Services in countries where both Save the Children and Viamo are operating. The Service is also well-positioned to add any other evidence-based content needed as the pandemic progresses, and can also be used to make relevant content available for any sectoral area.

Save the Children has a global network of experts who design behavior change and risk communication and community engagement campaigns. For the current partnership, the project is focused on COVID-19 information, but the team has experience developing behavior change campaigns across a wide spectrum of topics, so could replicate the project within its footprint of 120 countries either to address the COVID-19 outbreak or other topics."

"This project is sustainable. The 3-2-1 Service was launched nine years ago in Madagascar and has been replicated in 17 other countries since, with all of them still running successfully. The unique value-add of the 3-2-1 Service is that it is free to the user. This is sustainable because Viamo has established a partnership model where MNOs agree to provide free airtime and promote the Service among their subscribers. They do this as they have vested commercial interest. Gains from increased customer loyalty and higher average revenue per user offset the ongoing operational costs for the MNO.

Furthermore, the Service does not require users, or organizations, to invest in new technology, such as tablets, radios or TVs. The Service is designed to function on mobile devices that users already have - whether they are smart phones or simple phones. In countries with the Service, the average mobile penetration rate is 83%, which is determined based on the number of SIM cards issued. This significantly exceeds the rates of radio or television ownership, which are 43% and 39% respectively, meaning that a larger number of individuals have access to the mobile information sources than television or radio."

Access to information and knowledge, ICT applications: benefits in all aspects of life — E-health