With a lot of false information being spread about Covid-19 and the urgent need to prevent the spread of the disease to less resourced communities, the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Global Surgery division in the Faculty of Health Sciences has developed a platform for reliable and accessible information dissemination for communities without access to smart technology or data.
In the first two days of launching this platform, Associate Professor Salome Maswime, head of Global Surgery says they reached over 1 000 households. “The simplicity, accuracy of the information and translations into different languages have been highly commended by users.”
The platform uses a USSD code and is accessible without data or from a feature phone by dialling *120*1341*100#.