paperback. With e-readers, we are reducing the cost and complexity of providing reading material even in the most remote areas. Thus we can teach literacy, increase the level of education and consequently boost a country’s economy through better educated graduates. With the cost of digital content falling quickly, the shipping being a mere fraction of what it would cost to take the same amount of material in books, it seems rather simple. Writers the likes of Cory Doctorow and Daniel Pinkwater are donating their work to make the content available on the donated readers even more diverse.
“The world is a better place when people have access to more information. The goal of universal access to all human knowledge is a noble one,” Doctorow says about his involvement with Worldreader.
Noble it is, but is it realistic too? The challenges of this cause can not be underestimated. Although the prices are falling quickly, e-readers are still expensive. They may seem easy to use, but for students who have never had access to a computer it requires time-consuming training to teach them how to use their new gadgets. Yet these are all issues that can be more or less easily dealt with compared to the two biggest challenges: a) you can’t download books without internet access and b) you can’t charge a battery-powered gadget without access to electricity.
Trying to fund a solar cell and satellite internet access suddenly take things to a whole new level – and quite a disillusioning one at that. Internet access is a luxury that organisations like the Web Foundation are trying to make a given for everyone, but this is far from being achieved. Instead, it has been mobile technology that has been giving NGOs the chance to provide tools that make a significant difference. The area that has profited most from this little revolution is health care.
“Very few technologies have scaled down to even the remotest village in sub-Saharan Africa. Cars haven’t, fridges haven’t, literacy hasn’t. But mobile phones have,” says Joel Selanikio, co-founder of US-based social enterprise DataDyne. He would know: DataDyne’s open-source, mobile data collection tool EpiSurveyor has tackled one of the main weaknesses of healthcare in developing countries. The lack of tools to gather time-sensitive health data quickly and systematically is a disaster when it comes to disease prevention, consultation, diagnosis and treatment. That is why the systematization of the collection of health data has absolutely boomed in the last ten years. Using mobile phones as a database and writing easy-to-use software has helped to fight malaria, diarrhoea (which is, sadly, globally seen still the leading cause of illness and death) and reduced the number of deaths from measles in Africa by 90%. All this just because health workers suddenly have the possibility to access a database of information, without an internet connection, to find out about disease treatment guidelines, essential drug lists and patients’ records within minutes, in remote, resource-poor areas miles away from the next hospital.
By using PDAs to transmit and receive data via cellular networks, US-based NGO Satellife connected 175 remote health facilities serving more than 1.5 million people in Uganda to a data collection platform. As the program was brought to scale, the health officers’ knowledge of health care needs increased significantly even in the most remote areas. They aim to improve. Advanced platforms like recently released GATHERdata are being launched, making the aggregation of data speedier, the software easier to use, the analysis more sophisticated. GATHERdata provides digital forms for the collection of relevant data and sends it wirelessly to the district health office and ministry, into one central database. The information collected will immediately be scanned for anomalies. If any are found, the ministry can notify public health officials within seconds by text message – the time saved saves lives.
“GATHERdata is made up of ‘best of breed’ software elements and we are constantly evaluating possi