|
|
Submitted by Mike Grenville on Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:28 |
RapidSMS Child Malnutrition Surveillance in Malawi has won Columbia University and UNICEF the first-place award in the ‘Development 2.0 Challenge’ of the US Agency for International Development.
The system enables health practitioners in Malawi to share children's nutritional information by SMS, supporting efforts to enhance children's health and vastly reducing the time necessary to detect famines.
The Development 2.0 Challenge is the brainchild of USAID's Global Development Commons initiative. The challenge aims to cultivate innovation to achieve international development goals through the application of mobile devices as the most practical technology for connecting and exchanging information among people in developing countries.
The winning project, which will receive a $10,000 grant, is a startup from six graduate students at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.
Map & Track Malnutrition
The students will work closely with teams from UNICEF to finalize an open-source, ‘RapidSMS’ system, which uses basic mobile phones and text messages to collect information from health workers and improve the speed and quality of data collection.
With this data, the Government of Malawi, UNICEF and other partners will be able to map and track child malnutrition trends accurately and in real time. The tool will provide a critical means of intervention into rapidly unfolding food and nutrition crises.
Countrywide Roll Out
The initial phases of the Malawi project are expected to run from January through May 2009. After a month of co-creation and user testing at three growth-monitoring centres (GMCs), the system will be scaled up to the country level, covering more than 30 GMCs.
These centres act as sentinel sites, taking regular samples of the weight and health of young people, and feeding that information into centralized systems for nutrition and food security.
More about the project here at NetSquared.
New UNICEF Strategy
RapidSMS is a collaborative effort of UNICEF and partners in the Open Mobile Consortium including Frontline SMS and the Ushahidi project, all of which have used mobile technology to gather data from both local populations and development professionals in emergency situations.
The collaborative and open-source philosophy behind this development process means that anyone can use and adapt RapidSMS for his or her purposes. In addition, when it is time to scale up the system to monitor supplies and health data in the rest of Africa, there are no licensing fees, and local resources can be leveraged to ensure that the system is adapted appropriately.
The award winning project comes out of UNICEF's new strategy for using mobile and web-based technology to facilitate communication in Africa and around the world. Although “Innovation†is usually equated with “hi-tech,†UNICEF has recognised that sometimes the best innovation involves working with what already is, rather than developing something entirely new. As a result for the past two years, UNICEF and partners have been exploring ways to use existing technology to improve their programmes and provide innovative solutions to organizational needs.
From this work they have published a paper called Innovation for Africa, that provides an overview of efforts using mobile in low tech ways around the African continent.
SMS As Literacy Motivator
As well as providing some inspiring examples of how mobile messaging and web technologies are being used, the paper looks at some of the motivators to use. For example, contrary to the commonly held view that text messaging is damaging literacy, the report concludes that mobile phones, especially text messaging, present a significant economic incentive for becoming literate. In many places, sending one SMS is five times cheaper than a one-minute phone call9. If the value of reading a book is not apparent enough to inspire literacy, spending less on valuable communication is an obvious motivator.
The report urges UNICEF to rethink assumptions previously held about technology to improve efficiency and collaboration. The cost savings and increase in actionable information using mobile messaging could be enourmous. For example the report suggest that rather than hiring consultants for monthly visits to hundreds of schools to survey teacher attendance, why not visit once and teach children to send UNICEF a SMS on days their teacher is not present, or if the water supply is disrupted, etc.?
The report can be downloaded here: Innovation for Africa.
|
