Baby Blessed
Let me introduce you to Blessed Ene. She is 2 months old and rests contentedly in the arms of her mother Riza Abjo. I recently met Riza, along with a group of new mothers, at the Gbagalape Primary Health Centre in Abuja, Nigeria. Also in the photo is Irene Kaneng of Pathfinder International.
Riza explained to me that the regular text messages that she received while she was pregnant with Blessed were very important to her. She received timely and relevant information throughout and as the birth approached, she received practical advice to start saving money for transport to the hospital.
Riza and Blessed are living breathing examples of a successful mHealth service which, like so many others, operates effectively in Nigeria.
mHealth Community of Practice
Across town from Blessed and the Gbagalape Primary Health Centre, my colleague Victor Ohuruogu was chairing a GSMA mHealth Community of Practice meeting.
The Community of Practice is composed of the GSMA and a selected group of partners from across the public and private sector, who meet under the auspices of the Saving One Million Lives (SOML) initiative, with the aim of fast-tracking their SOML mHealth related objectives in Nigeria. SOML is an intervention commissioned by the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Dr Goodluck Jonathan, to improve health outcomes.
The Community of Practice is intended to be part of the health ecosystem in Nigeria. It is envisaged that additional partners will be added to the group, with the aim of maximising collaboration between the public and private sectors and with mobile operators, to build upon the already impressive work going on in mobile health in this country.
It is worth highlighting some of the concrete points discussed by this group:
- The need for experience and the sharing of what works in low-resource rural settings. Participants at the meeting differed greatly in geographic reach, from programmes currently operating only in Lagos and serving a highly literate population with a degree of smartphone penetration, to programmes operating solely in rural areas, facing both low literacy and low basic/feature phone penetration rates.
- The need to consider pricing for programmes in a Nigerian context. Programmes should set their price point and the level of underwriting for underprivileged clients to ensure demand and sustainability.
- The difficulties encountered with interoperability when working with mobile operators, which is often a business difficulty, rather than a technical problem.
- The need for partnerships to assist in the reduction of fragmentation, the achievement of greater reach and coverage of services and the leveraging of strengths.
The major lessons shared by stakeholders and highlighted by one of the partners (DHIS2 mobile coordinator from University of Oslo) include:
- Leverage existing systems – think national
- Work with the Ministries of Health
- Put servers online, but think offline
- Think scale from the start of the pilot phase
- Support a range of mobile devices
- Do not get locked in to one mobile operator
- Use local resources to drive implementation
- Work with partners – a network of action
- Share the collected information!
In the aim to reduce fragmentation of mHealth services and integrate common product concepts and players, it was agreed that services can be categorized into 3 groups:
- Demand generation: Client facing and Adherence Monitoring
- Data Surveillance and Supply Chain
- Registration and Health worker strengthening
You can see full reports from the Community of Practice meetings in January and February.
Current Focus of the GSMA M4D mHealth Team
The GSMA, through its Pan-African mHealth Initiative, is directly engaged in driving the launch of mHealth initiatives in 11 Sub-Saharan countries. Our work is fine-focused on the development of business cases, launch of services and replication of those services, by the sharing of best practice and tools, in the area of Maternal Newborn and Child Health (MNCH).
The GSMA focuses on creating commercial mHealth opportunities, ultimately crucial for sustainability as most projects are currently funded by donors and bilateral organisations.
For more information on the GSMA Mobile for Development mHealth, please contact us on mhealth@gsma.com. For information on various mHealth initiatives, click here. For more information on GSMA mHealth resources, click here.