Health and nutrition education programmes tend to engage women, because of their perceived traditional roles as primary care givers. Yet, 500 million women worldwide are illiterate. There is a strong need for a robust and scalable approach which does not rely on the written word to provide knowledge to marginalized populations. Audiopedia is tackling this challenge.
Audiopedia.IO is a mobile-friendly website providing expert health education and life skills for women using audio. CBOs/NGOs can benefit by using Audiopedia.IO as part of their Social and Behavior Change Communication (SBCC) strategy, as it enables them to search, download, embed and share audio files. By the end of 2019 approximately 5.000 audio clips with a total runtime of 150 hours will be available in 11 languages.
Audiopedia.IO was also optimized for search-engines, thus making contents easy to find. As a result, more than 15.000 women per month are directly accessing Audiopedia.IO to answer pressing health questions.
Audiopedia does also provide several technological solutions to make contents accessible to both literate and illiterate audiences. Solar powered audio players have been used to provide health education in several projects in East and Western Africa. Mobile web applications in combination with adhoc Wifi networks can stream Audiopedia contents without the need of any internet connection and independently from the electric grid.
In the future, Audiopedia aims to further enhance accessibility to its SBCC contents using voice user interfaces and programmable voice calls. All software developments will be open sourced, contents are usable under a Creative Commons license.