We highly appreciate your comment. However, our initiative doesn't include SMS text via cellphone. Our initiative is referred to as SMS being acronym for Social mobilization, Money for women, and Service quality promotion. In the social mobilization strategy, we use organized youth groups called Youth Educators for Success (YES) to produce local songs and role plays on issues of Sexual and Reproductive Health, gender rights, Harmful Cultural Practices; record them on mobile memory chips, and distribute to their peer groups so that the youth will listen to the songs and role plays using their mobile phones. They record in their local language of Afar Oromiya. We also have separate groups of women called Be Model Woman (BMW) in the same strategy. The role of a BMW member is to act as a role model to convince another woman in her circle of influence to go to health centers and use SRHS and other health services available.

Thank you for your comment. In our initiative, we advocate for an increase in the number of female health service providers to encourage and give confidence to the Afar women and girls to seek Sexual and Reproductive Health Services and to make their men feel secure. Whenever a male provider attends to them, they feel shy and this discourages them from attending consecutive visits. It makes them uncomfortable and many prefers to be attended by traditional birth attendants as they are predominately female rather than seeking for modern healthcare service and in the process risk both their lives and those of the babies. In our social mobilization strategy, we use organized male groups drawn from different walks of life in the community (teachers, health practitioners, religious leaders, opinion leaders, politicians, policemen, businessmen and clan leaders) as Joint Action Leaders (JAL) with the role of working as change agents for the betterment of the health lives of girls, women and youth in particular and the community at large. The groups are trained to mobilize their communities and facilitate issues related to SRHS as they have greater influence in their communities.