ParentText Optimisation and Evaluation in South Africa
Principal investigator: Professor Jamie M. Lachman and Dr Hlengiwe Sacolo-Gwebu (University of Fort Hare, South Africa)
Funders: LEGO Foundation, Oak Foundation
Start date: July 2020
End date: Ongoing
Project outline
ParentText is a chatbot-led parenting intervention designed to support caregivers through mobile messaging platforms such as WhatsApp. It gives parents and caregivers practical, evidence-informed parenting tips, activities and prompts to help strengthen caregiver-child relationships, support child development and reduce child maltreatment.
This project evaluates ParentText in South Africa. It is a part of the Global Parenting Initiative and builds on the Parenting for Lifelong Health suite of open-access parenting programmes. It asks whether a low-cost digital parenting intervention can reach families at scale and whether different types of support around the chatbot can improve caregiver engagement and outcomes.
Significance
Evidence-based parenting programmes can improve family wellbeing and reduce violence against children, but many families face barriers to accessing support. Digital interventions offer new opportunities to reach caregivers through technologies that are already widely used.
This project contributes to understanding how parenting support can be delivered through mobile messaging platforms and how engagement with chatbot-led interventions can be strengthened. It also provides evidence to inform the development and implementation of digital parenting programmes in South Africa and beyond.
Implementation
The project includes two linked studies.
- ParentText Optimisation Trial: The first study tested different approaches to supporting caregiver engagement with ParentText, including facilitated WhatsApp groups and varying levels of human support. Findings from this study informed the design of the subsequent evaluation trial.
- ParentText Evaluation Trial: The second study evaluated a brief, digital-only version of ParentText. More than 20,000 caregivers of children aged 2 to 17 years were recruited across South Africa in one of the largest randomised evaluations of a digital parenting intervention conducted in a low- or middle-income country.
Partners and setting
The study is based in South Africa and has involved collaboration with South African research, government and implementation partners. Project partners include Clowns Without Borders South Africa, UNICEF South Africa and South African government partners.
Ambrosio, M. D. G., Lachman, J. M., Zinser, P., Gwebu, H., Vyas, S., Vallance, I., and colleagues. A factorial randomized controlled trial to optimize user engagement with a chatbot-led parenting intervention: protocol for the ParentText Optimisation Trial. JMIR research protocols, 13(1), e52145.
Schafer, M., Lachman, J., Zinser, P., Calderon, F., Han, Q., Facciola, C., Clements, L., Haupt Ronnie, G., Kame, Z., Ntentema, Z., Sheil, R., Harris, J., & Gardner, F. (2025). Using a digital parenting intervention to prevent intimate partner violence and promote gender equitable behaviors in South Africa and Jamaica: A qualitative study exploring partnered parents’ experiences of ParentText. Violence Against Women.