Praekelt.org

Praekelt.org builds open source, scalable mobile technologies and solutions to improve the well-being of people in low and middle income countries. From mothers in South Africa, to adolescent girls in Bangladesh, our work provides communities with the essential information and vital services they need to fulfil their potential and improve their wellbeing. Praekelt.org projects and platforms are live in over 36 countries, reaching more than 10 million users across the globe.

Our key focus areas are health, gender, and youth. Our current projects include our maternal health platform, which is part of the South Africa’s Department of Health’s MomConnect system and will soon be expanding to Uganda and Nigeria; Girl Effect Mobile, which leverages mobile technologies to help adolescent girls reach their potential globally; Tune Me, a youth site engaging African youth on content around sexual and reproductive health; and our Incubator for Free Basics, a program that enables organizations to tap into the reach of Free Basics.

The technologies behind these projects include Vumi, a super-scalable conversation engine for delivering SMSes, star menus and chat messages built on top of Twisted, RabbitMQ and Riak and comes with a great set of unit tests; Junebug, a unified messaging gateway which connects governments, NGOs, enterprises and aggregators to local mobile network infrastructure; and

Molo, a content management system that allows organisations to create, publish and manage content to the web in a way that makes it accessible to millions in low-bandwidth environments.

You can read more about our work here