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The Challenges of Health Hotlines

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Some of us remember a time before the internet, before Google and Wikipedia, where seeking medical advice of any sort meant a trip to the doctor, a long wait in the clinic, followed by five minutes of consultation (and potentially, a large bill). This is still a reality in ...

Driving scale in mHealth – learning from two successful services in Africa and Asia

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Despite an increasing body of evidence in the efficacy of mHealth in driving health outcomes, many mHealth projects particularly in the developing world continue to find it difficult to scale beyond the pilot stage. There have been many reasons put forward for this; among ...

Tackling financial sustainability of mHealth services

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While sustainability is a broad term covering demand, supply, access, technology and many other domains, financial sustainability seems the most pertinent of them all. Financial sustainability directly impacts all of the above mentioned domains, whether it’s the end user’s ...

Gains in nutrition outcomes in Kenya

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A few years back, child stunting in Kenya was estimated at 35% for children under the age of five years. However, by 2014 this figure had reduced to 26%, according to the 2014 Demographic Health Survey. This reflects significant positive gains made by the Ministry of Health ...

D-tree International: Partnering for Impact in Mobile Health Innovation

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Naomi didn’t think anything was wrong when she was visited by Grace, a community health worker in Gairo, a rural community in Tanzania. Her pregnancy had gone well and so far everything was normal, but when Grace asked whether she had felt the baby move, she paused and said ...

Could “lessons learnt” from pilots help improve sustainability?

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Out of the words associated with mHealth, ‘sustainability’ is likely at the top of the list. It has become a very significant issue, with pilot after pilot failing to scale or get continuous funding. Could it be the transient nature in which we regard pilots? Being ...

From the MDGs to the SDGs: Improving the Lives of Women, Children and Adolescents

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For the last few weeks GSMA has been part of a global writing team, reviewing and revising the Every Woman Every Child Global Strategy 2.0. For the first time in history, we have the knowledge and the opportunity for women, children and adolescents to improve their chances ...

Zambia: Through the eyes of the mNutrition initiative

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Lusaka, Zambia. My arrival experience was less intimidating for a first timer than many other airports. The immigration queue was however a different story. It looked like I arrived with everyone else, from everywhere else. Eventually the queue cleared and I was able to ...

Connecting Mobile and Nutrition: Through the eyes of CSO Sun Zambia

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On 1st April 2015, the GSMA in partnership with CABI (www.cabi.org) and the National Food and Nutrition Commission (NFNC) held a productive workshop in Lusaka, Zambia. The event served to introduce a project to create nutrition-specific content and the key partners involved. ...

Highlights in 2014: Over 70 innovations in mHealth and health markets for the poor

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This is a guest blog written by Lane Goodman, Center for Health Market Innovations (CHMI). In 2014 we looked on heartbroken as Ebola ravaged West Africa’s health systems, seemingly destroying the hope and recent progress on health outcomes. Health innovators searched for ...

Where is the mHealth team going next?

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Excited for the future of mHealth in Mozambique, Zambia, Rwanda and Uganda I have recently started engagement with the Ministries of Health in my four countries (Mozambique, Zambia, Rwanda and Uganda) in order to understand their priorities and the various ways in which the ...

Taxi Diaries – mHealth, a brand people recognize?

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The most important mission I embark on when I arrive in a new country is finding a taxi driver who can speak English – even if it’s the broken kind. I don’t care too much for his/her driving skills really, as long as he/she can get me from A to B in one piece then […]

mNutrition: Integrating mobile into health in Zambia

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This is a guest blog written by Charlotte Jordan, CABI. On 1st April 2015, the GSMA and the National Food and Nutrition Commission (NFNC) will host a mNutrition workshop in Zambia. This will be an opportunity to bring together the nutrition community and introduce the GSMA’s ...

Hunger amidst plenty? The nutrition challenge

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“Cabin crew, 10 minutes to landing”.  I peeked out of my window and was sure the pilot was mistaken.  My previous visit to Malawi was in the dry season, and below me was a luscious green landscape reminiscent of tropical islands in just about every other movie.  As we came ...

GSMA mHealth Workshop at MWC15: The need to launch collaboratively to ensure commercial sustainability

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During MWC15 the GSMA mHealth team held the inaugural M4D mHealth Workshop. This event was convened to bring key GSMA stakeholders in the mHealth ecosystem together, to cement partnering opportunities and develop strategies to enable these partnerships moving forward. ...

mHealth efficacy and impact: How the GSMA and the mobile industry are working together to tackle the mHealth evidence gap

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Recently I had the honour of representing the GSMA at University College London (UCL) at the inaugural mHealth conference “How can mobile technology improve health in low and middle income countries”. The event itself was concerned with the growing need to provide consistent ...

Where does BIG health data go? Why the direction of data is important

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A recent article in The Economist on the mobile industry’s response to disease outbreaks (i.e. Ebola) highlighted the potential role that mobile operators can play in making healthcare institutions (e.g. private, NGO and public sector systems) more accountable to ...

Empowering and enabling decision makers to include mHealth services into their budgets

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This is a guest blog written by Judy Varndell from Deloitte Mobile adoption is expanding rapidly in low- and middle-income countries across Africa; and is increasingly being used to deliver health information to geographically diverse populations. mHealth projects in ...

Understanding the importance of connecting subscription, registration and identification in Maternal mHealth

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The GSMA mHealth team is delighted to share with you a new resource entitled Maternal mHealth: Solution / Product and Technology Framework that you will be able to find

Evidence for scale: the development of a monitoring and evaluation framework for mHealth – MomConnect Case Study

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Smisha Agarwal, Amnesty Lefevre, and Alain Labrique, Johns Hopkins University Global mHealth Initiative Garrett Mehl, World Health Organization Department of Reproductive Health and Research Mojca Cargo, GSMA Background In August 2014, the South African National Department ...