Adapting New Technologies for Humanitarian Aid @ SXSW.
This panel featured Kate de Rivero, Comms Manager at WAHA international, Ivan Gayton, head of Mission at Doctors without Borders, and Pablo Maygrundter software engineer at Google.
In Africa there are a lot of problems with keeping medical records, landlines don’t work but the new rise of mobile technology – 640 million phone users from a population of 1 billion. So we have a lot of new applications and services helping remote communities to stay connected. The challenge is to come up with digital solutions that don’t rely on internet connection.
ICow in Kenia used text messages to help farmers to manage their stock.
Mpesa is an mobile banking service that allows people to do bank transfers via text messages.
Ivan Gayton from Doctors without Borders worked with Google to map the spread of cholera in Haiti. Sharing real time data during a natural disaster is not easy. They couldn’t rely on the internet in Haiti, so they had to use old technology like GPS Garmin units from Best Buy, pool chlorine sheets and spreadsheets to source what was happening on the ground at the time.
This method allowed low skilled locals to jump on their bikes and gather the data, and then fill in the spreadsheets. This data was then combined with the health centers in Haiti and all the water systems on Google maps. Now they could monitor the spread quicker than ever.
Mapping the spread of cholera helped everyone understand how to react to the disaster: it helped the doctors to treat more than 100 thousand people, and it also helped UNICEF and the water authority to take necessary measures much quicker.