Dear Viamo Partners and Friends,
Happy New Year! May 2023 bring you peace and prosperity.
In 2022, Viamo celebrated 10 years of digital impact. Year after year, we’ve seen the impact we achieve together grow: from proliferating lifesaving health information, disseminating critical news, or influencing growth through behavior change games, more than 24 million otherwise digitally disconnected people engaged with Viamo’s services last year.
- With GIZ, one project had 15 million crucial health messages heard across 19 countries.
- In Rwanda, 15% of the population used our Viamo Platform to hear our development partners’ content.
In total, people spent 1.3 billion minutes on our Platform – the equivalent of more than 2,500 years! – while listening to 470 million life-enhancing and life-saving messages. All through simple mobile phones, in the language and dialect they speak.
Celebrating impact with our partners…
We had 250 partners entrust us to help them make digital easy in 2022. Here are some of our favorite stories of impact…
In rural Mozambique, results of a Digital Training with FHI360 that set out to increase women’s health education showed knowledge retention increased by up to 30% among participants, which included community health workers. Read more here.
In our second year of a project with GIZ, behavior change was driven by 65% in 19 countries and reached more than 2 million people. The project focused on secondary effects of COVID–19, like agriculture production, domestic violence and vaccine misinformation. Read more here.
We won a Digi Award with MercyCorps in Nepal! A multi-year program funded by USAID is helping people in the Karnali region of Nepal with information on important topics like healthcare, hygiene and safety. And this information is made available through simple mobile phones.
The Viamo Platform
In 2022, we took steps to build our Platform for deeper and broader impact. The Viamo Platform helps our development and business partners share their important information to a national audience. This is accessible by dialing a short number, commonly 3-2-1.
The Viamo Platform is now available in 22 countries. We are excited to announce to our partners in Senegal, Liberia and Mozambique that our Viamo Platform is now available to reach otherwise digitally disconnected people in these countries. Now, more than 270 million people have free, on-demand access. More than 250 partners partnered with Viamo to make their public service messages available on the Viamo Platform.
With the Viamo Platform growing, we are finding new and innovative ways to drive engagement and delight both our partners and our users. For the first time, we made our services such as Digital Trainings and Surveys available on the Platform, making it easier for partners to engage with the audience they wish to target.
This makes training for the general public, farmers, women, parents, and entrepreneurs or businesses accessible to the whole country. Mobile surveys will also be available to far larger samples from these groups as well as targeted demographics.
Viamo’s Platform growth over the years.
With the plan to build the most intuitive Platform for the digitally disconnected, we closed out the year by signing a grant from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This will allow us to significantly grow the reach of our Platform to women and girls, making it easier for our partners to now reach a demographic that has been otherwise challenging to reach by traditional technical means worldwide.
Looking forward
Heading into the next chapter, we remain committed to remaining your trusted resource to make digital inclusion and digital engagement easy and a natural part of your goals. Towards our mutual goals, we are ensuring that the 2.5 billion digitally disconnected people worldwide have the information we provide together to make healthy and informed choices.
This year, we are looking forward to…
- Improving our ability to reach your target populations through all of our services.
- Increasing the impact and affordability for you, our partners, by making our Platform’s user experience even better
- Expanding the Viamo Platform to even more countries, including Kenya, Pakistan, Ethiopia, and Sudan
With a new year ahead of us, I’m excited to go further and faster by continuing to work together with you. Thank you for being on this journey with us.
Happy New Year!
CEO, Viamo
