Real Social Innovation to Help HIV Sufferers

Vienna.
The next Challenge Social Innovation 2011 speaker is Maurice Biriotti, who’s moved from the academy into private business; he still thinks that the humanities are the richest source of problem-solving of all the areas he’s worked with. Humanities scholars are genuinely innovative, most of the time, and the humanities can be used to drive the process of innovation.

He describes this through a practical example: some years ago, when his company did some corporate work in Mexico, he became interested in the nature of conversations in rural Mexico; there, there are many people who are HIV-positive, but this is a taboo topic, and sufferers tend not to tell anyone about their condition (even their partners). Sufferers would benefit significantly from taking available medication, and people are more likely to continue to do so if they have a strong support network – but that network was not available in rural Mexico.

Maurice’s project used the power of conversation to address this issue, and the humanities played a crucial role in this. Humanities research framed the question in such a simple way that innovation became possible, providing a deep perspective on the human dimension (something which the social sciences tend not to be able provide); it outlined the context and possibilities of the innovation; and it was able to examine and track the progress of the innovation.

What the project did was to use mobile phone technologies that enabled users to send SMSs to multiple users at the same time; the project provided mobile phones to rural locals who had never had access to such technology, and connected them to other sufferers; the phones could only be used for SMSing these other users, not for any other purpose; and the messages were visible to the researchers. Some 40 users who participated in this project generated a quarter of a million messages over the course of the project, and even brought down the telecom network across all of Mexico for a while. A significant sense of community between participants emerged, who finally had somebody to talk to, privately and secretly. (A similar project is now going to be developed for HIV-positive mothers in South Africa.)