Abstract

High prevalence of anemic conditions due to HIV/AIDS, malaria, malnutrition and others have increased the demand for blood in Malawi. Trends have shown that most blood donors donate only once. Voice call reminders, which are expensive and un-scalable, have so far been used to encourage repeated blood donations. Although there has been an increase in the use of mobile phone short message service, little or no effort has been made to use them to encourage repeated blood donations. Furthermore, research has so far not focused on exploring attitudes and behaviour towards the use of the technology in voluntary activities of national interest such as blood donation. Using an experiment of four blocks each with 319 respondents and a survey of 120 randomly selected blood donors in Blantyre, this study has found that blood donors have positive attitude towards SMS and that the technology has a significant impact on increasing repeated blood donation. Since this was a cross sectional study, the main limitation of the study was inability to perform extended post analysis of the experimental group‘s behaviour to include those whose cognitive processes take longer before making a decision. Additionally, the survey was limited by respondents who gave socially acceptable responses while their actual position may be different.

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School	: School of Natural and Applied Sciences
Issued Date	: 2012

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