Social Impact

Chapelboro.com recently featured Caktus’ work in implementing the first ever voter registration system via text message.

Caktus team members from our Libya mobile voter registration team recently spoke with TechPresident about the context and challenges of implementation.

The Triangle Business Journal recently featured our work in Libya on the first ever SMS voter registration system.

Today’s election in Libya, the second general election for a governing body since Gaddafi’s ouster, is being supported in-country by our Caktus team. Caktus developers created Libya's SMS voter registration system, the first of its kind in the world.

FastCompany named Caktus client, UNICEF, as one of the Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Local. UNICEF received this honor for their launch of RapidSMS, an open source platform for quickly building SMS applications.

Colin Copeland, Managing Member at Caktus, has wrapped up work, supported by UNICEF, as the Community Coordinator for the open source RapidSMS project. RapidSMS is a text messaging application development library built on top of the Django web framework. It creates a SMS provider agnostic way of sending and receiving text messages. RapidSMS has been used widely in the mobile health field, in particular in areas where internet access cannot be taken for granted and cell phones are the best communication tool available. This has included projects initiated by UNICEF country offices in Ethiopia, Madagascar, Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

The following is a press release posted in partnership with our team at UNC  and Duke.

The web application development company Caktus Group has teamed up with researchers at the UNC Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases and the Duke Global Health Institute to develop a mobile phone app that may help patients better adhere to their medication regimens.

[As part of the Fulbright Enrichment [From Lab to Market]{style=“font-style: italic;”} seminar, Caktus hosted 16 Fulbright students from around the world on Wednesday, May 29th. The participants were engineering and science students with an interest in Public Health and Mobile Health innovation.]{#docs-internal-guid–15dfdd3-f622-293e-da9c-340d4c5b5818}

UNICEF clients Erica Kochi and Christopher Fabian were listed among Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2013 for creating text-message based applications in the developing world. They spearheaded RapidSMS, the open source web framework used for applications like sending infant HIV results via text in Zambia. Caktus worked directly with Kochi and Fabian and were instrumental in the core development of RapidSMS, the creation of RapidSMS.org on behalf of UNICEF, and initial RapidSMS applications in Africa.

SwitchPoint is a one-of-a-kind conference and a unique opportunity to learn, share ideas, and hear about global and mobile health efforts around the world. We had a great time at SwitchPoint last year. I’m excited to announce that Caktus, for the second year in a row, is sponsoring [SwitchPoint 2013]{style=“color: rgb(17, 85, 204);”}.