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 proceed to my hotel. It struck me that the route to the hotel was surrounded by a vast expanse of land. I spotted a soy bean farm right beside the airport and as I am immersed in the mNutrition initiative, my first thought was “protein source – check!” Following up on my previous blog, I am very aware that it is not enough to have a full plate, but that we all need a diversified and balance diet for our bodies to function well.

Zambia, like many other countries, has its fair share of the malnutrition burden. 45% of children under 5 are stunted (too short for age height/age) and 5% are wasted (too thin/light for weight/height). These indicators demonstrate an absence of key nutrients in the diet, which inhibit the regular growth of children.

The next morning we began our flurry of meetings, all arranged by Mojca Cargo, mHealth Project Manager for Zambia. We started off with the Ministry of Health, which has made great strides in creating efficient and scalable ICT infrastructure to handle both current volumes and potential growth in mHealth services. This struck a good note as that is usually one of the great challenges when the topic of scaling up services is discussed. We were assured that growth in services will be adequately handled.

We discussed the potential to consolidate mHealth services under one point of access. The idea of having one single short code for users and finding an array of services to select from resounded well with the Ministry of Health. Such aggregation can help increase exposure to important services, as well as build a critical mass of users to justify the much needed mHealth business case. We also met Airtel Zambia who expressed strong support for mHealth services at national scale as well as aggregation of service points for the sake of consumers. It is evident that Airtel wants to help its customers and the people of Zambia to achieve improved health outcomes by leveraging mobile technologies.

We then met with several mHealth stakeholders including the Zambia Centre for Applied Health Research and Development (ZCARHD), the World Health Organization and the Swedish International Development Agency, all with the aim of establishing potential collaboration for impact in nutrition outcomes for pregnant women and children under the age of five.

It was a brief but very fruitful visit, as we continue to forge partnerships and collaboration to scale mHealth services, and to ensure that nutrition programs can leverage mobile for greater reach and personalized support for pregnant women and young mothers. There is a lot to look forward to in Zambia!

For more information on GSMA Mobile for Development mHealth, please see here or contact us on [email protected].