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Read, Debate: Engage.
| topic: | Health and Sanitation |
|---|---|
| located: | Tanzania |
| editor: | Bob Koigi |
The impressive adoption of ICTs in low income countries continue to deliver impressive dividends as modern innovations solve some of the most biting problems.
In Sub Saharan Africa, technology, combined with savvy and innovative youth, is providing unprecedented home grown solutions to the region’s predicaments.
Nowhere is this evident than in the health sector where poor infrastructure, lack of requisite skills, facilities and poor government policies have conspired to rob households off their children, breadwinners and brought economies to near collapse.
But innovations that range from apps that use phone cameras to interpret test results, connect health workers to patients in hinterlands, diagnose killer diseases like pneumonia faster than doctors and drones that are delivering drugs to hospitals that would otherwise not be accessible through the dilapidated road networks have not only saved lives through early diagnoses, but increased awareness on the need for early treatment and encouraged preventive measures which have given the entire healthcare system a new lease of life.
And in a continent where the public healthcare, which is relied upon by over 80 per cent of the population that cannot afford the expensive private sector medical attention, is dogged by massive corruption and pilferage of medical supplies, technology has been at the rescue. An investigation by Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria indicated that more than $2.5 million worth of drugs had either been stolen or diverted from intended use in 13 countries majority from Africa between 2009 and 2011. In Tanzania where theft of medical supplies has been rampant, a technology dubbed Okoa, Swahili for Save, has been tracking how drugs move from government warehouses to the health centers ensuring that every single item can be accounted for. It has seen government save millions of dollars while sparing lives of ordinary Tanzanians. Imagine the impact if such is replicated across Africa.
Such low-cost innovations coming from Africans who understand the depth and gravity of the health issues the continent faces, are the ultimate solution in ensuring no one loses their lives to avoidable illnesses in the 21st century. They deserve global support.
