Category: Health
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Can We Text Our Way to Behavior Change?
Read moreJason Hahn is Business Development Manager ICT Innovation, at Grameen Foundation Seattle.
Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) that show the evidence of mobile phone based development interventions do not come out every day. At Grameen Foundation we look forward to them as they can help us shape our interventions with fact-based evidence of other interventions that worked – especially when they show an almost 25% change in behavior.
It was with great interest to read about one that did just that in a recent Lancent article on "the effect of mobile phone...
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Congrats to OpenIDEO challenge winners using MOTECH!
Read moreOpenIDEO 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...
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In Their Own Words: How Does MOTECH Ghana Help Ghanaian Mothers?
Read moreJason Hahn is Business Development Manager ICT Innovation, at Grameen Foundation Seattle
In Jessica’s last post she discussed how MOTECH Ghana helps nurses manage their work and care for patients. In this post I’d like to explain a bit more about the services MOTECH Ghana offers, through the Mobile Midwife application, to pregnant and new mothers and their family members and then let some of those mothers explain in their own words how this helps them.
What is Mobile Midwife?
“Mobile Midwife” is a service that enables pregnant women and their families to...
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How Does MOTECH Make Nurses’ Lives that Much Easier?
Read moreJessica Osborn is Business Development Manager MOTECH, at Grameen Foundation Ghana
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...
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Introducing MoTeCH to Communities One Durbar at a Time
Read moreKirsten Gagnaire is Project Manager MoTeCH, at Grameeen Foundation Uganda.
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...
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Community Knowledge Worker Pilot Report and Program Launch
Read moreLydia Namubiru is Partnership Analyst, CKW program, at Grameen Foundation Uganda.
In early 2009, Grameen Foundation went to Uganda with the idea of creating a fluid and effective two way communication channel between rural farmers and the world of agricultural experts, development agencies, traders and commercial players. Through this loop, rural small holder farmers would be given livelihood saving agricultural information generated by the experts and the big players would keep informed on conditions on the farm from adoption of best practices to available...
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Our first MoTeCH Community Health Worker System Workshop
Read moreAliya Walji is Technical Program Manager, MoTeCH, at Grameen Foundation Ghana.
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.
Our goals for the workshop were to learn as much about the...
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How do AppLab Programs Get Started?
Read moreTim Wood is Director, Mobile Health Innovation, at Grameen Foundation Ghana.
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.
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Rapid Prototyping Goes “Up Country” with MoTeCH
Read moreKirsten Gagnaire is Project Manager, MoTech, Grameen Foundation Ghana.
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...
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Grameen Foundation´s ICT Innovation Program – Approach and Philosophy
Read moreDavid Edelstein is Director, ICT Innovation, at Grameen Foundation DC
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...
