Shout-It-Now (Shout) is an innovative social enterprise, empowering youth to own their sexuality. We concentrate on hard to reach communities; we go to the places where they are, provide services they want, in such a way that they choose to keep coming back. We are a local South African organisation that leverages innovative digital tools and engaging mobile bus clinics to deliver health services to vulnerable communities.
Since 2007, we have leveraged private sector principles to design services that are client centric, creating a friendly environment that empowers clients to make informed choices about their health and future. To date, more than 1.2 million South Africans have learned their HIV status through Shout programming.
As a local South African organisation, we are dedicated to ending the HIV epidemic by providing HIV prevention services to vulnerable population groups and empowering our clients to take ownership of their own health outcomes. South Africa has the largest HIV epidemic in the world – with 1 in 5 people living with HIV and close to 200 young women becoming HIV positive each day. Additionally, 1 in 3 women experience intimate partner violence and 8 women report an incidence of gender-based violence (GBV) every hour in South Africa.
Due to the disproportionate impact of HIV and GBV among adolescent girls and young women (AGYW), our primary focus is reaching this population group with comprehensive health services in non-clinical settings in a way that is friendly, non-judgmental, and convenient. Our professional staff are recruited from the communities we serve, allowing Shout to offer services for youth, by youth.
Our model has been designed to use technology to ensure efficiency, quality, and scalability at every step — from registration (using biometrics) to case management (Connect Hub call center) to knowledge transfer and ongoing virtual engagement (iSHOUT! data-free mobile app).
Our paperless system ensures speed of service and enables us to gather data efficiently to inform decision-making and program development, while ensuring streamlined and agile operations.
Shout has developed an approach that is more engaging for clients, more effective in achieving positive health outcomes, and more efficient for funders. Taking a social entrepreneurship approach – Shout is driven to provide quality services, focusing on client satisfaction and continuous improvement.
We aim to equip our clients with the tools needed to ensure they have an empowered and independent future. We will leverage our success providing friendly services at the community level to broaden our reach and move into additional healthcare service areas that are most essential for the communities we serve.
