East African Business Week (Kampala)
Bosco Hitimana
9 July 2007
Kigali — The U.S. Government and leading global players in the mobile phone industry have joined forces to fight HIV/AIDS and other health challenges in 10 African countries.
'Phones for Health' is a US$10million public-private partnership which brings together mobile phone operators, handset manufacturers and technology companies.
They work in close collaboration with the ministries of Health, global health organizations, and other partners to use the widespread and increasing mobile phone coverage in the developing world to strengthen health systems.
It was officially launched at the 3rd GSM World Congress held in Barcelona on February 13 this year.
Phones for health partners that include the GSM Association's Development Fund, the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), Accenture Development Partnerships, Motorola, MTN and Voxiva met at the recently concluded global HIV implementers' meeting held in Kigali, Rwanda from June 16-19.
The MTN Rwanda Chief Operations Officer (COO), Mr. Andrew Rugege said MTN works with Rwanda's Treatment and AIDS Research Center (TRAC) in its TRACnet system to collect HIV/AIDS information using data and voice technologies.
"Phones for health help us as producers to give something back to our communities. It is value added to us because a healthy person makes a healthy market", Rugege said.
MTN provides toll-free phones that help Rwanda's TRACnet to receive and disseminate information from upcountry health centers through the TRACnet system.
He informed participants that MTN Rwanda will very soon sign a contract with the ministry of health to provide internet connectivity to health service providers in Rwanda.
The chief executive officer (CEO) of Voxiva Mr. Paul Meyer and the manager of GSM Association Development Fund Ms. Dawn Hartley showed that there are 1.8 billion phones in the developing world and 1 million new phones are purchased each day.
The use of phones in the health sector is of vital importance once it is decentralised in all possible daily tasks in the fight against the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Rwanda's TRACnet system that was installed by Voxiva two years ago was hailed at the meeting. The director general of TRAC Ms. Anita Asiimwe revealed that the performance of TRACnet in collection, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of critical information related to HIV/AIDS care and treatment in the whole country is of vital importance.
Phones for Health will allow health workers in the field to use a standard Motorola handset equipped with a downloadable application to enter health data. Once entered, the data is transferred via a packet based mobile connection known as General Packet Radio System (GPRS) into a central database. If GPRS isn't available, the software can use a SMS data channel to transmit the information. The data is then mapped and analyzed by the system, and is immediately available to health authorities at multiple levels via the web.
The system also supports SMS alerting and other tools for communication with field staff.
Phones for Health aims at developing an integrated set of standard information solutions which support the scale-up of HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, Malaria and other health programs.
The partnership seeks to speed up the use of mobile phones for actual time data capture and deliver solutions to developing countries in ways that are cost-effective, manageable and sustainable.
This will help in building the foundation for national Health Management Information Systems (HMIS).
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