Future Of Health: Project Mwana Empowers Zambian Health Workers With Mobile Technology

Project Mwana is a UNICEF Innovation initiative, working with the Zambian Ministry of Health in Malawi to find appropriate, scalable and impactful ways that mobile technologies can strengthen health services for mothers and infants in rural health clinics.

Project manager Merrick Schaefer shares his insight on Project Mwana below:

What recent projects have been particularly inspiring to you?

I really liked this Instedd project. I am not sure that a wheel makes things simpler or not, it will have to be field tested but I like pattern of thinking that went into it. How can we use simple things like SMS to really push into new spaces and deliver new services. What can we do with paper or workflows to make something simple like SMS do more.

What has been the most interesting or surprising development to come out of Project Mwana?

Probably the most interesting aspect of Project Mwana has been the literal plethora of uses of SMS in the clinic context for this one problem. It started with results delivery, a rather simple and straight-forward use case. When the lab processes a sample automatically send the result to the clinic it came from. Then we thought we would track samples being sent to the lab, then introduce elements for accountability, then tools for reminding mothers to come back to the clinic, then district, province and national reporting, then supply management. It just doesn’t stop. And this is one problem in the clinic context.

When you start from the perspective of the user, in this case a rural health working in a remote clinic, and you start seeing their problems you actually start seeing real ways that mobiles will make their jobs easier. And when the end user sees their needs being addressed they don’t need much training and then they suggest more types of services that could help them.

What emerging technologies are you looking forward to being able to work with to help with the development of Project Mwana?

While I am pretty happy with RapidSMS and trying to explore uses within the context of SMS only phone I am pretty intrigued by USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data). Being able to maintain a session on any phone in the world and have real back and forth interactions brings some of the power of “smart phones” into the reach of billions of people.

Thanks Merrick!

Project Mwana