Hajo van Beijma Co-founded the Dutch NGO Text to Change. With a special interest in health communication it has been always one of his goals to work in Africa. When he learnt about the enormous growth of mobile telephony, especially in Africa, he got the idea of using Mobile telephones to reach out to people with health and educational messages (mHealth). Together with two colleagues he founded the Text to Change (TTC) Foundation early 2007. After having received an initial grant from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs TTC executed two successful programs targeting 35,000 mobile phone users with HIV/AIDS sensitization messages in Mbarara and Arua, Uganda, in 2008 and 2009. Until now Mobile telephony was never been used on such a large scale and systematic manner for this purpose. Text to Change has created an uptake in HIV testing of 35% in the regions where they launch their text message based quiz. At Text to Change Hajo is responsible for developing new programs, partnerships and heads the finance department.
