NGOs and health
SMS for NGOs and health programmes in Malawi
Programmes in Malawi often serve people far from a clinic and far from mobile data. SMS works on basic phones, which makes it a practical way to remind, inform and coordinate.
Plain messages that protect privacy
Moni Grace. Your next visit to the clinic is on Tuesday 18 Mar at 9 am. Call 0888 000 000 if you cannot come. Zikomo.
Distribution for Traditional Authority Kachere is on Monday at 8 am at the primary school. Bring your registration card.
All field officers: monthly reports are due on Friday at 4 pm. New forms are at the district office.
Where SMS fits a programme
- Reminders. Clinic visits, immunisation dates, follow-ups and training days.
- Community notices. Distribution dates, meeting points and changes of plan.
- Staff and volunteers. Quick messages to field teams, community health workers and lead farmers, wherever they are.
- Urgent notices. Weather and outbreak information from the responsible authority, to the people it affects.
Design for how people really use phones
Many households share one handset, and many people use basic phones. Use the local language people read best, and keep to one point per message. Say who is sending, because an unknown number is easy to ignore. For Chichewa, avoid the letter ŵ and curly apostrophes, which push a message to Unicode and shrink each part from 160 characters to 70. The SMS counter shows you the effect before you send.
Working with data systems
Small teams can run everything from the dashboard with an Excel upload. If your programme uses a health information or case management system, the SMS API lets it send a reminder when a visit falls due, and a signed webhook can write the final status back to your records.
Questions
What health details can go in an SMS?
As little as possible. Phones are shared in many households, so a reminder should not name a condition, a test or a treatment. Say that a visit is due and let the clinic do the rest.
Can a project budget be planned in advance?
Yes. Multiply your people, your messages per person and the parts per message by K20. One one-part reminder a month to 1,000 people comes to K20,000 a month. Your reports show actual spending, and you can export them as CSV for donor reporting.
Can we send reminders automatically?
Yes. Campaigns can repeat daily, weekly or monthly, and a health information system can call the API when a visit is due.
Can people reply to our messages?
Replies to a sender name do not reach the platform, so treat SMS from a sender ID as one-way and give a phone number to call. If you need two-way messaging, talk to us about your project first.
Keep reading
Talk to us about your programme
Tell us who you need to reach, and we will help you plan it.