South Africa’s Praekelt Foundation has been named the first South African winner of the Social Impact category of the 2011Mobile Marketing Awards for Innovation, Creativity and Leadership.
The award announced at a ceremony in Los Angeles, USA, saw Praekelt Foundation honoured with the Global Award and EMEA Regional Award for its YoungAfricaLive project. YoungAfricaAlive project helps the youth tackle HIV-AIDS, sex and relationships challenges through social media. The project is hosted on Vodafone Live and available free to Vodacom users in South Africa
“We’re really thrilled at the recognition given to YoungAfricaLive by this award,” said Praekelt Foundation’s Creative Director, Jonathan MacKay who was in LA to accept the award.
YoungAfricaLive has more than 600,000 youthful members on the community forum. The project was nominated for the Social Impact category alongside Giorgio Armani and R/GA’s Aqua di Gio Armani Drops for Life App, Waterfall Mobile’s Waiting for ‘Superman’ Social Action Campaign and Busday and TELiBrahma’s Busday gets buzzier project.
At the recently concluded Tech4Africa event, Praekelt Foundation was awarded the Tech4Africa Innovation Award.
In October Praekelt launched Africa’s first mobile career opportunities social network, Ummeli. Since its launch just less than a month ago, Ummeli has attracted over 20,000 active users. The social network aims to utilise the supportive community of young jobseekers that can offer advice, suggestions, ideas exchange, connections and information on jobs, bursaries and grants.
Apart from YoungAfricaLive and Ummeli, Praekelt Foundation also runs such innovative solutions as TxtAlert and Project Masiluleke.
The foundation aims to build open source, scalable mobile technologies and solutions to improve the health and well-being of people living in poverty.
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