Saving Lives With a Simple PDA
This story is more interesting than its cute title would suggest.
This is an article from Fortune.com describing the efforts of Teresa Peters and her Bridges.org agency, a non-profit IT consulting firm based in Cape Town, South Africa.
The interviewer, David Kirkpatrick, cites the two reasons why he thinks that this is a story worth telling:
First, if you believe as many of us do that technology is a transformative social force for good, this is the ultimate test. The global economic divide is the world's single biggest problem today and the root of many of its ills. Tech can help, but it's not easy. It can give the world's underprivileged tools to increase their productivity and incomes, enabling them to pay for what would otherwise be prohibitively expensive. The second reason is more one of business pragmatism. As University of Michigan Business School professor C.K. Prahalad and others have explained, the biggest opportunity for large companies to grow is for them to tap the biggest markets of all—those that are home to all the world's more than six billion people, not just the few hundred million that have wealth in the most developed countries. C.K.'s book on this—The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid—is out this summer. There is a beauty to this convergence—markets grow and people are helped, in tandem.
My first reaction was recalling something I remembered from a conference, where the speaker said that third-world countries were not necessarily interested in our cast-offs, but in this particular case, you can see how the use of pda's for clinical medical support makes them more valuable than a pc or any other resource.
Many IT-related projects in Africa are failing. That's because, Peters says, too many ignore the basic criteria for success: "Small, cheap, local, and relevant are the key things for IT here, with a suite of applications around the device." Often, for instance, what's appropriate is not a PC but a handheld, or even just a cellphone. (One of the main reasons for that? PCs are often stolen.) Assessments are not what's needed, she says. Action is.
This was the real payoff:
Peters says the most effective use of technology she's ever seen was in a pilot project that gave doctors and medical students in Kenya Palm handhelds that contained a regularly updated set of medical reference materials.
The article goes on to talk about open source and Linux, but the description of the ability to create projects using handheld technology that cannot be done as easily in a highly-bureaucratic hospital IT setting is exciting. For example, a project is mentioned that uses cellphones and SMS messages translated into local languages to keep tuberculosis patients informed. But the bureaucracy does creep in courtesy of the Gov't.
For instance, in South Africa voice-over-IP Internet calls are illegal, as is Wi-Fi wireless Internet access unless it is inside a private building. "So you can't use Wi-Fi to expand Internet connections," she complains. The rules protect the revenues of the national telephone monopoly.
You find more information at their Web site: http://www.bridges.org/
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