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From: "ICTWorks" <wayan@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Feb 22, 2012 5:04 PM
Subject: A Ugandan mHealth Moratorium Is a Good Thing and 2 more
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**
   A Ugandan mHealth Moratorium Is a Good Thing and 2
more<http://www.ictworks.org>
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A Ugandan mHealth Moratorium Is a Good
Thing<http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Ictworks/~3/--bTgwxNHWY/ugandan-mhealth-moratorium-good-thing?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email>

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 01:00 AM PST

[image: mhealth-projects-uganda.jpg]<http://www.flickr.com/photos/texttochange/5178727492/>

I am David McCann <http://ug.linkedin.com/pub/david-mccann/37/81a/675> and
when I first arrived in Uganda, I used to describe it as "the perfect
storm" for aid in general, and M4D in particular. The country overall has
the necessary cellular coverage for a successful M4D project.

Kampala is comfortable, with mild weather, good infrastructure (Umeme
Electricity Co. notwithstanding), and more than its share of
international-style restaurants for all those expatriate aid workers. And
in contrast, the impoverished Northern regions of the country have the
necessary need for immediate and long-term intervention from development
organizations, from the small NGO to Big Aid.

*The government, at first blush, seems to enjoy the arrangement*

Discussions of corruption within any large organization or government could
fill volumes, but to put it succinctly, big money flows through Uganda,
funds many of its public programs, and is certainly strained through the
appropriate parliamentarians (and yes, a few high-paid NGO consultants)
before arriving where it's needed.

The result is almost a gold-rush frenzy to get one's own brand of smart
phone and wheel-reinventing Android app out to a handful of Village Health
Team workers and change the world. In theory, this sounds like a win for
the Ugandan people...

*In practice, there are other details to consider*

You've managed to track drug stock-outs in a sub-county in Moroto using
solar chargers and 50 Samsung Galaxies. That's great, can we share data
with a similar project I did using BlackBerries in Gulu? Probably not.
You've rolled your own drug-stock-tracking application. And yet when
members of Big Aid met with the Ministry of Health, to account for the
overlapping features of their mHealth applications and whether API
integration is possible, one actually responded along the lines of "well,
it's backed by a relational database, so in theory, yes."

While true, this misses the intent of the question by a wide margin. It's
worse in the education sector, where the Ministry of Education and Sports
has unfortunately contracted a private US company to write a proprietary,
never-completed application for tracking district-level attendance. A year
ago I was told it did have an API, "using SOAP." A year later the company
has yet to elaborate on that single sentence worth of documentation.
<https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150560220444576&set=a.10150332933969576.349004.183382104575>
Uganda MoH mHealth Stop Work Order

*Ministry of Health is pushing coordination*

In contrast, the Resource Center at the Ministry of Health has in their
employ a talented young IT professional, whose task has been to migrate
literally dozens of historical databases (in MS-Access, shudder) over to
their running instance of DHIS2. When I have the pleasure of speaking with
him, he gets excited about software using Django, FOSS in general, and API
layers for sharing data. He's part of an elite few Ugandan IT professionals
who are changing their country for the better.

DHIS2 is fulfilling the medical recording needs of not only Uganda, but
many other countries in the region including neighboring Rwanda. It is
free, open source, and continues to have features added to it by an active
community. Its adoption by (and related referendum from) the Ministry of
Health in Uganda signals perhaps not a changing of the guard, but at least
the entrance of a few people in key positions who pay attention.

These champions are forcing the Big Aid organizations to do M4D in a more
coherent way<https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150560220444576&set=a.10150332933969576.349004.183382104575>.
They've cut the tracking of health-based indicators that serve only as
metrics of aid success, and they get excited (and sometimes even angry)
when they see the messages people send in to an anonymous hotline about
drug stock-outs or health provider absenteeism. (For those in Uganda, the
hotline is a free SMS short code, 8200, and you can report on any problems
in your local health facility).

*If you want to do M4D in Uganda, you have to be willing to collaborate.*

If you still think the best way to succeed is by handing out an iPad to
every village health worker in the parish you're working in, great. Just
make sure first that no one else is handing out Androids there too. And
when your pilot crashes and burns because it can't scale country-wide, your
data should at least be able to feed into a system that tracks the entire
small-scale NGO graveyard of projects, because the sum total of the data
actually is useful, even if the project itself ultimately wasn't. If you're
Big Aid, it means you're going to have to start re-thinking the budget of
that $hundreds-of-thousands grant, because it probably shouldn't have your
own branded software platform as a line item.

Obviously, I see this as a good thing. It's a powerful indication that at
least at the Ministry of Health, Uganda is ready to take ownership for its
development. And really, isn't that sort of the whole point?


.

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Get an ICT4D Job with Inveneo, Catholic Relief Services, or
infoDev<http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Ictworks/~3/9gvRrtPREQE/get-ict4d-job-inveneo-catholic-relief-services-or-infodev?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email>

Posted: 21 Feb 2012 05:31 AM PST
[image: inveneo.jpg]

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[image: READ_Global_CMYK.jpg]

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[image: crs.jpg]

*Manager–ICT4D Projects:* Catholic Relief Services seeks someone to manage
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deadline for application is March 12. More information is available
here<https://www2.apply2jobs.com/CRS/ProfExt/index.cfm?fuseaction=mExternal.showJob&RID=599&CurrentPage=1>
.
[image: infodev_1.jpg]

*Senior Program Coordinator:* The World Bank's
infoDev<http://www.infodev.org/en/index.html>program needs a Senior
Program Coordinator for its EPIC (Entrepreneurship
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[image: war_child.jpg]

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International<http://www.warchild.org/>is a network of independent
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is March 4. More information is available
here<http://www.warchildholland.org/nieuws/3170/senior-ict-media-advisor.html>.



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