Kopernik: Connecting Innovative Technologies with Poor Communities
We are lucky to have a guest post today by Ewa and people like her in general who are doing what they can for global health. She and her team have just launched a new web platform connecting you with poor communities and technologies that might be needed there via an online store. I cannot emphasize enough that is this is long long overdue and that we should all be embarrassed that this hasn’t happened before. So major kudos to Ewa and her team for pulling this platform together and giving it a shot. Please visit their website and spread the word (you can also read there Tech for development blog here):

Guest Post by Ewa Wojkowska, a former UN worker, is the co-founder of TheKopernik.org.
As the rubble is cleared in Haiti, as a measure of stability comes to Sudan, as Sri Lanka holds a bitter peace and as Burundi faces its first election in the wake of massive civil war, a new development opportunity presents in some of the world’s poorest and most troubled places.

Online social entrepreneurship for the poor is one of the most compelling ways to fight poverty—and to reshape our development practices. Examples like Kiva and Global Giving are already leading the way, linking people anywhere in the world to better assistance and real results. The internet has created the opportunity for a transparent virtual marketplace: communities in developing countries identify their local needs, individuals anywhere in the world directly respond. Today our site—www.thekopernik.org—joins the force, connecting breakthrough technology to the poor through an online marketplace. It’s a simple, direct idea for real assistance to people in need.

Here’s our idea: Registered local organizations provide short proposals explaining their needs—simple water filtration in Freetown, Sierra Leone, self-adjusting eyeglasses in Manado, Indonesia. Any visitor to the site, anywhere in the world, can review the proposals and make donations to fund the plan of his or her choice. We connect these breakthrough technologies—water filters and drums, self-adjusting eye glasses, and solar lights, just to name a few—to the people who need them most.

What sets us apart is the focus on technology and a review mechanism for local organizations, or ‘technology seekers’, to rate the products. By including a feedback mechanism on the effectiveness of these technologies, Kopernik gives voice and choice to local communities and organizations – simple elements that are so frequently missed in international development efforts. We’re looking to take out the delays and to spark new ideas in international aid, one click at a time.We believe this is the new face of development.

If more people everywhere have safe, unfettered access to clean water, more efficient means of transporting that water, clear eyesight, and reliable light, how would their choices change? How would they see the world and their place in it? What could their empowerment achieve?

We now have the technology to improve everyone’s lives, and the internet is the window to get these life-changing technologies into people’s hands, directly and efficiently. We’re building a resource that those in need can access for themselves.

Ewa Wojkowska, a former UN worker, is the co-founder of Kopernik.org. The website launched this past week.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Kopernik Sells Technology To The Developing World (techstartups.com)
• Sierra Leone link to India medics (news.bbc.co.uk)

Nota bene: These are a few highlights from CGI – please do add your inspirations/ideas in the comments!

Clinton Global Initiative – Making things happen through Commitments

Action speaks louder than words. At CGI, you’ve got to commit – and that has an amazing impact.

What will your commitment be?

CGI was the birthplace, in past years, of projects like Matt Damon’s water program (water.org, expanding this year to Haiti), the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women Initiative, and so many more. In the five years of CGI, there have been 1,400 commitments made (participants are required to make commitments to existing projects or commit to creating new projects), valued at $46 billion dollars, and impacting the lives of 200 million people in 150 countries. This year’s meeting will give birth to 30 more of these programs – more by Andrew Mersman over at Passport Magazine/ Change by Doing blog.

Check out CGI Commitments here.

Innovation!

Business Week highlighted innovation as a top priority for the global economy, and President Obama announced a new strategy for innovation: A Strategy for American Innovation: Driving Towards Sustainable Growth and Quality Jobs. Download white paper.

Judith Rodin of the Rockefeller Foundation identified innovation strategies that could be applied to social problems – user-driven innovation, crowd sourcing and collaborative competitions reported here by Alexandra Cheney at Fast Company.  And Innovate Today: 8 Ways Business can End Poverty - superb post by Steve Enders over at tonic.

A few people – including Muhammed Yunus and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala of the World Bank at CGI had an Innovation Wish List. Yunus talked about the edible yogurt pot, and Judith Rodin announced a new initiative to help the poor – the Global Impact Investing Network. This gets my vote for one of the most exciting developments to come out of CGI – read the Economist article.

Investing in Women and Girls

Women make up half of the world’s population, but do 2/3 of the world’s work, produce 50% world’s food, earn 10% world’s income, own 1% of world’s property.

Read the rest of this entry »

In my work in the field, I am no longer surprised to see test stockouts, essential medicines stockouts, supply stockouts, broken or missing diagnostic machines, or patients who are afraid of healthcare workers. It is a complete tragedy, and as I work to help, I think of all the people who are sick or die because of failures of the healthcare system, who cannot tell anyone their stories. For those who do not work in the health system, or haven’t had an experience of health system failure, transparency and data on implementation is practically invisible – so there’s no public awareness of the issues.

So I was thrilled to see recent developments in accountability – the Stop the Stockouts campaign, and the creation of the Budget and Expenditure Monitoring Forum in South Africa.

Power to the People: Stop the Stockouts

Stop the Stock-outs , a multi-country Africa campaign, is using text messages sent by activists and members of the public to expose stock-outs of essential medicines at public health facilities and put pressure on governments to address the issue. It was launched in Kenya, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia by Health Action International (HAI) Africa. During Pill Check week in June, facilities were surveyed, and a map of stockouts was created. The image below incorporates July 2009 data. It was found that many government health facilities were routinely running out of, or just not stocking essential medicines to treat common diseases such as malaria, pneumonia, diarrhoea, HIV and tuberculosis (TB).

“We were finding availability levels in rural, lower-level health facilities of 40 or 50 percent for essential medicines,” said Christa Cepuch, a pharmacist at HAI Africa. Read more from IRIN here

Show me the Money: HIV Policy AND the Budget and Expenditure Monitoring Forum in South Africa

With a new government in South Africa as of May, there have been some very positive signs. Read the rest of this entry »

I am bouncing for Beijing this Friday, so I thought it would be a good time to do some desktop clearing. Some good links below:

GIS for a changing health landscape, link
Open Source/Science’s Greatest Need Is … Non-Scientists?, link
Interview with Isaac Holeman of FrontlineSMS:Medic, link
New Female Condom Campaign Set for Uganda, link
Sending out a (Google) SMS in Uganda, link
IDEO Ripple Effect at the Water Summit India, link
Africa Could Feed and Fuel the World, link
Web 2.0 Goes Bollywood-for GOOD, link
Brickmakers and Human Rights in Pakistan, link
Debating Which Aid Works Best is to Miss the Point, link
Who’s in charge of global health spending? link
Poverty tourism is getting a lot of attention lately, link

Bonus: Recycling Solutions
In Mali turning plastic bags into paving stones, link
Global recycling efforts, link
Is paper better than plastic? link
For the do it yourself’ers a plastic laptop bag, link

Related articles by Zemanta

• Designing useful mobile services for Africa (googleblog.blogspot.com)
• 5 US Cities and States Fighting Plastic Bags, 5 Cents at a Time (treehugger.com)
• Uganda’s Appfrica Labs (whiteafrican.com)
• Location Based Services in Uganda using SMS. (mobilewellbeing.info)

Image courtesy of kiwanja.net

Late last week I read news from three different sectors, all about “South-North” innovation transfer, a topic we’ve discussed here before, particularly in the context of mHealth. Earlier this year Fast Company reported on the concept of trickle-up innovation, citing the examples of yogurt microplants in Bangladesh (Group Danone, Grameen Bank) and Mosoko, touted as Craigslist for the next billion in Kenya (Nokia). In addition to these cases of MNCs from the global North testing out concepts in the South, Fast Company presented examples of corporations from the South, including ICICI (banking, India), Natura (cosmetics, Brazil), and Goodbaby (infant products, China).

Here are the three articles from this past week:

1. HEALTH SERVICES: To Fix Health Care, Some Study Developing World, Wall Street Journal, 2 Jul 2009. The University of Alabama-Birmingham AIDS clinic turned to Zambia for a model of increasing the number of patients who showed up for treatment. Based on early successes, they are continuing under the project name “Zambama”.
2. FINANCIAL SERVICES: DOCOMO to Launch Mobile Remittance Service, NTT DOCOMO press release, 2 Jul 2009. Later this month Japan’s DOCOMO will enable individual subscribers to use their mobile phone to remit money to other subscribers. Such a branchless banking/financial remittance service is certainly prompted by Safaricom’s M-PESA service from Kenya.
3. CLEAN TECH: Worldchanging Interview: Shawn Frayne, 2 Jul 2009. The interview is about wind technology, but touches on broader issues related to South-North innovation flow. Frayne thinks that “the constraints of the developing world can provide the necessary inspiration to make significant technological leaps that can benefit the Global South and Global North simultaneously”.

There are various other examples from the last several years suggesting a growing trend in countries from the North learning from the South. Here are examples just around financial services for the poor:

• Opportunity NYC was the first conditional cash transfer (CCT) program in the U.S., based on the Oportunidades program developed in Mexico.
• Less than one month ago international development micro-lender Kiva launched a pilot program in the U.S.
• Grameen Bank supports microcredit in places like Norway

Add to that the various management principles we’ve learned from the Aravind Eye Care System and Mumbai’s dabbawallas. Extending the argument presented by Fast Company, these examples show that South-North innovation transfer doesn’t have to be focused on corporations.

While it’s enticing to think about mining untapped innovation potential in the South for the benefit of the North, the real potential is much broader. Innovation can (and does) flow in all directions, not just South-North, but also North-South, South-South, and within countries. The challenge is to learn from different ways of approaching the same problem. Or even similar problems: see how Kaiser-Permanente visited a flight school to reduce medication errors and how the NHS worked with Formula 1 team to improve ICU procedures.

Given this potential, the big, open question is this… How do we increase global sharing of ideas and models to spur innovation?

As with the last post, I’m copying the description of the session I just attended – Vouchers for Health (Session C3) - from the conference website:

Presenters Discuss: the potential of competitive vouchers in increasing access to priority services for currently underserved populations (Nicaragua); how subsidized, targeted vouchers can achieve the goal of improving health of poor women and children, elements that improve access to high quality health care services, how targeted voucher subsidies help meet the goal of contributing to development of a national social health insurance system that is accessible, affordable and acceptable (Kenya); a nationwide, high transaction distribution project for insecticide treated nets (ITNs) that has given rise to the application of technologies in the use of a relational database as a means to track each voucher transaction, ensuring security and traceability, providing spatial analysis using GPS coordinates, leveraging data from this project to others by providing a central data repository to government, and exploring SMS and mobile phones for automating voucher transactions and gathering patient information (Tanzania); and how poor pregnant women were selected for vouchers jointly by field workers and community support group members, how the institutionalization process for the voucher scheme was implemented, and how the health facilities were strengthened to provide quality maternal health care (Bangladesh).

Why should we care about voucher schemes? Three reasons from where I sit. These schemes provide:

1. An attractive model for extending the reach of services without significant infrastructural investment
2. Incentives for competition to improve the quality of service delivery
3. A mechanism for reducing financial barriers for the poor

Despite this promise, my experience over the last few years – including stumbling through a poster presentation about vouchers in Uganda for Ben at APHA in Boston a couple years back – has taught me that the concept tends to be elusive to “outsiders”. The World Bank’s Private Sector Development Blog has a concise overview of output-based aid for those that aren’t familiar. I won’t try to explain myself, since I’ll probably make some errors.

This session brought together diversity in geography – the talks covered Latin America, Africa, and Asia - and in services – anti-malarial bednets, safe motherhood, family planning, STI prevention and treatment. What was most interesting to me then was not the details of any specific program, but what we might be able to learn from having these different experts in the same room.

So what were the common themes?

1. Vouchers work. Nicaragua saw increases in service utilization, condom utilization, family planning uptake, and KAP. Much of this across different subgroup analyses – age, level of sexual activity, type of residence. The others similarly all saw positive gains in what they were trying to achieve.
2. Institutions matter. In Tanzania, the market is being flooded with free ITNs (possibly LLINs) under a new policy to achieve universal coverage – the fate of the 7000 bednet retailers under the Tanzania National Voucher Scheme (TNVS) is unknown. In Kenya, Nairobi and Kiambu saw better results for the voucher scheme because of existing infrastructure. Nairobi actually had provided more voucher-based services than vouchers sold in Nairobi because of women coming in from outlying areas. Tanzania benefits from a manufacturing base that can produce ITNs and a system that encourages people to pay for a portion of their health care.
3. The system will be gamed. The much higher reimbursement for providers of C-sections than vaginal deliveries has led in some cases to higher rates of C-sections than is necessary. April Harding who was moderating said that multiple schemes have been used/proposed for dealing with this, including capitation (e.g. for 100 women, X% will be reimbursed for C-sections). Fraud is also a problem. While nobody discussed incidences of counterfeiting, the Tanzania program has taken big steps to prevent counterfeiting, including watermarks, microprinting, and a bar code. The bigger issue with fraud is related to ineligible participants obtaining and using vouchers intended for other populations, whether by income or geography. Which leads us to the next point…
4. Equitable distribution is hard. Ineligible participants seem to be a problem with all these programs. In Bangladesh they responded by bypassing governmental decisions about who would get vouchers and relied on CSGs (community support groups) to make the decisions. Another trend is that those who are more poor tend to utilize vouchers less – it is unclear if this due to cost, education, and interaction among the two, or something we’re not thinking about.
5. Understanding redemption is complicated. This was my one question. In both Tanzania and Kenya – the others didn’t present these numbers or I didn’t catch them - the rate of redemption (number of people receiving services under the voucher scheme divided by the total number of vouchers distributed) – was around 80%. After I asked the question and before the panelists responded, my neighbors said that: (1) 80% is pretty good, and (2) the Tanzanians unlike the Kenyans don’t pay for their vouchers until they use them. In Tanzania then, the reasons are grounded speculations: perceived value of the ITNs, access, cost. In Kenya, the majority of the outstanding 20% is due to accounting. The real utilization is expected to be much higher since the cutoff for the evaluation excluded women who had received vouchers, but had not yet delivered (safe motherhood program). Still a minor portion of this is due to women who are unable to deliver at contracted facilities due to a lack of transportation or the timing of the pregnancy.

Ever since the President announced his global health funding goals, polite turf battles have erupted between those in the AIDS funding camp and everyone else, so this LIVE webcast on Thursday might be interesting (details at the end of the post).  There are some applauding this fundingand some who are not. For example just last week the managing director of the Global Network for NTD (thanks to Clarissa for this quote), stated:

Good Obama – “We applaud the President’s decision to include funding for neglected tropical diseases in his
Global Health Budget.  The return on investment for the American people will be enormous.  Cost-effective investment in life-saving medicine for the world’s most vulnerable populations will not only improve health but strengthen our
relationships with countries in strategic parts of the globe.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Please vote for Ben’s mobile payment for health systems project. Voting closes Friday.

VOTE – NETSQUARED: By introducing a smartphone and web-application system for submitting and reviewing claims, we hope to reduce the delays and errors, increase clinics’ profitability and improve communication. Below is a related post by Melissa Ho who is working with Ben on this project which fills a critical gap. Cross posted from ICTDCHICK:

First HealthyBaby Birth

The mother receives the baby from the nurses at the clinic.

As I have been pre-occupied with writing lectures for my class, and setting up my research, my collaborating partners at Marie Stopes International Uganda have been busy launching a new phase of the output-based aid voucher program, financing in-hospital delivery of babies, in addition to the in-clinic treatment of sexually-transmitted infections (STIs). The new program, called HealthyBaby is eligible to mothers who qualify under a specific poverty baseline and covers four antenatal visits, the delivery, and a postnatal visit. Last week they just started distributing vouchers, and this past weekend was the delivery of the first baby whose birth was covered by the program.

Like the HealthyLife program, the mother purchases a voucher for 3000 USh (approximately 1.50 USD, the HealthyLife program charges 3000USh for a pair of vouchers treating both sexual partners). The voucher then can be broken into several sticker stubs, one of which is submitted with a claim form on each visit.

The first mother puts her thumb print on the HealthyBaby claim form

The hospital then submits the claim form with the voucher to the funding agency (my collaborating organization), who then pays the hospital for the cost of the visit – labs, any prescriptions given, the consultation fee, etc. You can see in the picture to the right the nurse filling out the paper form and the mother putting her thumbprint on it. Filling out the forms can be tedious and error prone – this particular clinic had almost 18% of their STI claims rejected for errors last October. In the same month another clinics had 38.6% of their claims rejected. I am trying to work on digital systems that can help improve communications between the clinics and the funding agency, and also decrease the cost and burden of claims administration.

The Claim Mobile project actually focuses on the HealthyLife program – the STI treatment program, rather than the HealthyBaby program, but I hope to demonstrate the sustainability and replicability of the system that I’m developing by training the engineers here to retool my system for HealthyBaby – so by the time I leave, I am hoping it will be in place for both programs.

By coincidence, this first birth occurred in one of the two clinics where I’m running the pre-pilot of the Claim Mobile system.

“In London, Washington and Paris, people talk of bonuses or no bonuses…in parts of Africa, South Asia and Latin America, the struggle is for food or no food…the greatest price for incompetence at the summit will be borne by the poorest people in the world.

Oxfam has calculated that financial firms around the world have already received or been promised $8.4 trillion in bailouts. Just a week’s worth of interest on that sum while it’s waiting to be deployed would be enough to save most of the half-million women who die in childbirth each year in poor countries.”

Nicholas Kristoff, NY Times, At Stake are More than the Banks, April 1, 2009

A different more pro-active spin on the above comes from Lynne Twist:
“This is a time that I think history will look back on and say, ‘These are the people, this is the generation of humankind that went through a transformation that made the future of life possible. These are the people who had the courage to make profound changes in the way they were thinking, as well as in the way that they were behaving, that gave the future to life itself.”

If you only read one thing this week, the below article deserves your attention. I have excerpted only bits and pieces, the full piece is worth reading. Co-authored by Laurie Garrett, this is a much better, more cohesive and articulate encapsulation of the current economic crisis than what I wrote last week (if I only had 1/4 of the writing ability of Garrett!).

The End of the Era of Generosity? Global Health Amid Economic Crisis
Kammerle Schneider email and Laurie Garrett
Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, Jan 2009
Global Health Program, Council on Foreign Relations

For too long, the international community has responded to global health and development challenges with emergency solutions that often reflect the donor’s priorities, rather than funding durable health systems that can withstand crises…The global health community must now objectively evaluate how we can most effectively respond to the crises of 2008 and take advantage of this moment of extraordinary attention for global health and translate it into long term, sustainable health improvements for all. Over the past eight years global health has taken center stage in an era of historic generosity as the wealthy world has committed substantial resources to tackle poverty and disease in developing countries…there has been a massive swell in the number of nonprofit organizations (NGOs), faith based groups, and private actors contributing to this boon.

Past is prelude
The emergence of HIV/AIDS fundamentally transformed the way in which the world engaged global health. It shook world leaders…It awoke the average citizen to gross disparities… The fight against HIV/AIDS rallied tremendous financial support for global health, while at the same time, moving investments in health from infrastructure: clinics, roads, sanitation, and personnel, to funding disease specific initiatives with emergency, short term targets, and often unsustainable results.

International institutions and governments heavily reliant on steady inflow of foreign donor funding are now frantically trying to resolve how to continue the operations of their health programs… Undoubtedly, the economic crisis will crimp humanitarian aid, and international efforts to fight disease and alleviate poverty.

The special challenge of HIV
Increased focus on the urgent management of specific diseases has weakened the ability of health systems to respond to crises. To respond to the AIDS epidemic, the share of global health aid devoted to HIV/AIDS more than doubled between 2000 and 2004 – reflecting the global response to an important need, yet, the share devoted to primary care dropped by almost half during the same time period...In many of the countries hardest hit by the pandemic, a large portion of their funding for AIDS medications come from outside donors. For example, in Mozambique, 98 percent of all funding for the country’s HIV/AIDS programs comes from outside donors…the nation’s extraordinary dependence on external support begs questions about the efforts’ sustainability, and country ownership and control… As we enter an economic downturn, the sustainability of emergency initiatives, such as PEPFAR, that are 100 percent dependent on a never ending supply of donor dollars, are called into question.

Moral hazard amid complexity
Instead of making things simpler and more efficient on the ground, in many cases, the rapid increase in funding and number of global health players has made the mechanisms for delivering aid even more complex. At the developing country level, hundreds of foreign entities are competing for the attention of local governments, civil society interest, and the desperately short supply of trained healthcare workers…

A moral path forward
Given the scale of the world’s healthcare workers deficit, no progress can be made in the creation of universal primary care systems if models continue to be doctor-based. Even if the world committed today to the most massive medical training exercise in history, the deficit would not be overcome for more than two generations. Only a substantial commitment to building genuinely viable health infrastructures centered on community based workforces, coupled with local profit incentive systems, and global scale supply and inventory management…The crises of 2008 have brought together committed government officials, UN agency leaders, NGOs, faith-based groups, and corporate actors to collectively think about new ways to break out of patterns of charitable giving and move towards real sustainable investments in health…A number of promising initiatives are beginning to emerge. In this time of financial catastrophe, the onus sits squarely on the shoulders of global health advocates living in the wealthy nations: push your governments and philanthropic institutions to not only maintain their technical and financial commitments to the poor nations of the world, but actually increase the scale of investment to reflect the rising costs of doing good in a troubled world. It is conceivable that 2008 will mark the beginning of the end of the Era of Generosity. But it is equally probable that the economic crisis will usher in a bold new era of investment in the public goods of poor and emerging market nations worldwide. Successful navigation of these turbulent waters will require a shift from the morality of “charity,” to that of “change”…