SA youth caught between digital ambition, cultural traditions [Study]

South Africa’s youth are living in the progressive digital age but still strongly influenced by cultural traditions. That’s according to the results of a brand new study by the Praekelt Foundation — an organisation which aims to use mobile phones to improve the lives of people living in poverty.

YoungAfricaLive (YAL), its award-winning mobile platform, aims to educate the country’s youth about HIV and AIDS start open discussions about love and relationships.

The portal, which has almost a million users in the country and recently launched in Tanzania and Kenya, surveyed more than 170 000 of its users to gather the results of this year’s YAL Youth Sex Survey. The findings were announced at this year’s Mobile Health Summit in Cape Town.

The study showed that South African youth are struggling to find a balance between the modern world and historic customs. “This tension between being young and living fully in the digital age and coming from families and communities where culture and religions are still important is amply reflected in this year’s survey,” said Praekelt Foundation founder Gustav Praekelt.

Through more than 50 quick polls on the platform, YAL users shared their views on everything from HIV to sex and relationships. Thirty eight percent of youth surveyed said that the differences between their cultural traditions and western society keep growing, with 14% responding that they could not reconcile the two. 

Thirty two percent of the YAL users who participated in the poll said that they didn’t want to know their HIV status, but the majority said that they had been tested within the last year.

They also shared their opinions on the video of the gang rape of a mentally ill girl that caused a social media storm earlier this year.  A total of 3 033 users voted in a poll about the video — most (46%) thought that the crime revealed a “real problem with the way some guys relate to women” and 27% said it showed how young people would do anything to record it on their cell phones and show it to their friends.

YAL, which is available for free to Vodacom users, is one of Praekelt’s many mobile platforms designed to improve the wellbeing of communities through access to information.  Another of its products — TxtAlert, an SMS service which reminds patients of doctor’s appointments and to take their chronic medication — won the Tech4Africa innovation award last year.