Posts Tagged ‘Ghana’

Congrats to OpenIDEO challenge winners using MOTECH!

Friday, May 13th, 2011

OpenIDEO along with Nokia and Oxfam recently ran a challenge on maternal health entitled “How might we improve maternal health with mobile technologies for low income countries?”  The challenge brief was:

OpenIDEO has partnered with Oxfam and Nokia to explore how mobile technologies can be used to improve maternal health (particularly in pregnancy and childbirth). We’re asking you, the OpenIDEO community, to come up with inspirations and concepts around improving the knowledge and access to maternal health services, specifically where mobile technologies can be used as a tool to aid this. We’re focusing our solutions in low-income countries, such as Burkina Faso and Bangladesh. In many such countries fees for health care prevent millions of mothers from seeking the professional care they need or where under-investment means health works or medicines are unavailable.

Free Maternity Camps

Free Maternity Camps

There were many great responses and we’re glad that two of them, Free Maternity Camps and CareGiver Solution for Midwives, were both based on Grameen Foundation’s Mobile Technology for Community Health (MOTECH) platform.  Free Maternity Camps would “send medical teams from a base hospital to remote areas where moms-to-be will be examined by doctors. The concept of the maternity camps is inspired by Aravind’s free eye camps in India.”  The CareGiver Solution for Midwives would “help midwives/HCW monitor expecting mothers, identify risk pregnancies and involve a doctor when required.”

Congrats to Krassimira Iordanova who submitted these winning concepts.  We’re looking forward to learning how they turn out.

How does MOTECH make nurses’ lives that much easier?

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

Jessica Osborn is the Business Development Manager at MOTECH Ghana

A pregnant woman registers for the Mobile Midwife service

MOTECH Ghana is an initiative of Grameen Foundation, Ghana Health Service and Columbia University which aims to use mobile technology to improve the quality of antenatal and postnatal care for Ghanaian women and their families. MOTECH has developed an information service called Mobile Midwife which delivers time-specific voice or text messages to pregnant mothers and their partners and families both before and after birth.  We have also built a simple java-based app that enables nurses in rural Ghanaian health facilities to automate much of their record keeping and reporting, which formerly took 4-6 days per month. This nurses’ application also makes it easier for nurses to identify patients who have missed certain care.

We recently sat down with some of the nurses who use our app and here is what they told us:

A nurse describing how the app has helped with paperwork: “It’s been good because it helps us with our reports. Sometimes our tallying gives us incorrect data. With the phones we know the data that we get at the end of the month is correct. We used to have to pick lots of forms in different places and take them elsewhere, now it’s much easier.”

Our Mobile Midwife service requires pregnant parents to provide a due date and their location when they register for the service.  The service then sends messages to parents when appointments are due or overdue to remind them to visit the health clinic for check-ups.  One nurse told us, “with MOTECH we also get our clients easily because we get messages listing our defaulters. Some of them also come to access services because MOTECH sends them messages telling them to come. We get people coming here telling us that MOTECH has told them to come to the facility.”

Another nurse really appreciated the reinforcement that Mobile Midwife messages provided for his own outreach efforts – “When we see our clients for a child welfare clinic we gather them in a big group to educate them but we don’t have time to do that 1:1. Often these meetings are big and noisy so not everyone picks up what you’ve said. That’s why MOTECH is good because it provides 1:1 information to them along with personalized reminder messages.”

We really appreciate the cooperation we have received from the nurses of the Ghana Health Service in developing, testing and finally deploying MOTECH. The nurses provide critical health care services to remote communities, which is a challenging task. We’re happy to have the opportunity to make their work on behalf of Ghanaians a little easier.

Introducing MoTeCH to Communities One Durbar at a Time

Friday, June 11th, 2010

The village Chief's band performs

Durbars are community entry ceremonies that must be done in all of the 11 zones where we are working with Mobile Technology for Community Health (MoTeCH) .  They include bringing offerings to the Chief, telling the community members about MoTeCH, dancing and hopefully getting the community members to formally “accept” MoTeCH as a valuable health service.  Durbars last for several hours, usually take place under a tree and we’re holding them for all 11 zones this week so we can keep on schedule with our launch activities.  (more…)

Our first MoTeCH Community Health Worker System Workshop

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

Joyce Ndago and Maria Nuela, two of our MoTeCH field staff

In December we had our first workshop to introduce and test our mobile phone technology for MoTeCH to community health workers (CHWs) in the Upper East Region of Ghana. Prior to this workshop, much of our field research and testing has focused on building content for our “Pregnant Parents” application, but today we were focused on how MoTeCH can help practitioners deliver high quality antenatal and neonatal health care. (more…)

How do AppLab Programs Get Started?

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

Health Clinic Registration Desk

How do AppLab programs get started?  How do you really understand the best way to address the problems that people in poor rural communities face?  The approach we have consistently taken for AppLab projects is to conduct a broad “needs assessment” survey at the very outset of the project.  We work with experts in ethnographic research who spend hours and hours interviewing people in the field.  The end result is qualitative data which helps to guide and inform our project work. (more…)

Lessons About Pregnancy and Motherhood Via Songs on a Mobile Phone?

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
The "MoTeCH Song" being performed

The "MoTeCH Song" being performed

As a part of our MoTeCH initiative, we are holding content workshops to learn more about what types of information local women want and need in relation to their health. In Accra, Ghana, Eve’s Pregnancy School has offered lessons about pregnancy and motherhood to women  for over 10 years, and has seen over 2,000 mothers through safe pregnancy and delivery. The founder, Florence, gives bi-monthly classes to pregnant women and mothers; she attended our first content workshop recently and had lots of fantastic input for our program. One of the key takeaways from the workshop was that singing and music is an important part of Ghanaian culture and this class opened with the women singing a local song about womanhood, empowerment, and feminine beauty. It definitely got people excited! Part of the class was then given over to the group chanting “positive utterances” such as “my body is strong”, “i will have a safe delivery”, “my family loves me”, and “my husband loves me”. Teaching was interspersed between these more fun and participatory sessions. (more…)

Rapid Prototyping Goes “Up Country” with MoTeCH

Monday, October 19th, 2009

Woman on phone - UER

Since the beginning, the Mobile Technology for Community Health (MoTech) team has been focusing on using rapid prototyping for figuring out what will – and won’t – work in the rural environment.  A week ago, the team headed to the poorest region in Ghana – the Upper East (UER) – to set up a series of exercises to determine whether pregnant mothers would be interested in asking questions about their pregnancy and newborn care via mobile phones. We were wanted to understand what types of questions they were interested in having answered, and what the technical (mobile phone usage, SMS vs. voice, network issues) aspects of providing this service to parents in rural areas would be. (more…)

Grameen Foundation´s ICT Innovation Program – Approach and Philosophy

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

We officially launched our Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Program two years ago, when we began our Application Laboratory (AppLab) efforts in Uganda.  This initiative, in collaboration with the mobile operator MTN and Google, built on the successful Grameen Foundation/MTN Village Phone Program.  With over 10,000 Village Phone Operators, this served as a unique testing ground for developing applications and information services tailored to the needs of the poor.  Over nearly two years we explored the potential of more than 50 services, actively tested a subset of these, and in the end of June launched a suite of five services nationwide (additional details at www.applab.org). (more…)