How can Africa benefit from mobile health?

Africa has dealt with communication limits in the past, but mobile technology has made a big difference in the progress of healthcare. Ralph Simon explains how mobile technology has impacted Africa.

Transcript

00:00

You could go with a little mobile phone to one of these women, see these two young boys pedaling

00:06

like crazy, and your phone could get charged for a few cents. [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:16

I think it's obvious, if you start off with the premise that only 24% of Africa has electricity.

00:24

Yes, the big cities do have electricity. But frankly, even in the biggest cities-- Lagos as an example--

00:31

electricity supply is inconsistent. Even in South Africa, which, for many years, prided itself on the fact that they had an uninterrupted flow

00:40

of electricity, has blackouts. This is the case in most countries, perhaps with the exception of Botswana, which is very well-governed, well-run, and so forth.

00:49

An interesting phenomenon happened probably 15 years ago, when mobile phones first started to get

00:56

into the African firmament. And in fact, it was interesting because I knew a professor of civil engineering

01:02

in South Africa who had been working in a Mission Hospital. And he'd actually developed a water pump

01:08

to get water from an outlying area into the Mission Hospital, where he took a standing bicycle--

01:15

basically, a bike on a stand-- and he would get some young teenagers to pedal like hell. And they would pump water in.

01:23

And that same idea was then utilized to pump electricity into little charging batteries for women--

01:30

predominantly women, as strangely as it sounds-- to go with a little mobile phone to one of these women, see these two young boys

01:38

pedaling like crazy, and your phone could get charged for a few cents. What was interesting about the mobile area

01:45

was that it leapfrogged a whole generation of technology and certainly landlines. In most African countries, you either

01:52

have to bribe or wait an inordinate amount of time to get a landline. And so when the first mobile phone started coming in,

01:59

there was an almost immediate pickup in Africa for being able to communicate. And, of course, being a very oral culture as it

02:08

is-- that's not to say that there isn't a written culture or an intellectual academic culture. But being an oral culture, it also

02:15

allowed, for the first time, in many instances, in major African agglomerations, of people to communicate with each other.

02:22

And then, of course, once the text messaging element started that, too, became an issue. [MUSIC PLAYING] [BEEPING]