GSMA’s Mobile World Congress 2013 set new records! With more than 72,000 visitors from over 200 countries, attendance increased by 8 per cent over last year’s event. Additionally, over 50 per cent of this year’s Congress attendees hold C-level positions, including more than 4,300 CEOs.
Health played important role on the conference side. With two seminars in the main conference programme and four additional seminars on Thursday, a lot of buzz was created around health and mobile health. It was interesting to see how newcomers to the field were still discussing how mobile can improve access to health, reduce costs and increase efficiencies, and how existing players already spoke about challenges and how to create sustainable business case.
One of my favourite presentations was from Sara Chamberlain, the Head of ICT in India for BBC Media Action, who discussed mHealth in the context of their recent Mobile Kunji and Mobile Academy project [1] launch in Bihar, India. Her presentation, ‘Making a living from mHealth isn’t easy…’, covered everything from how challenging mHealth is even though ‘the scale of opportunity is huge’ to presenting how BBC Media Action overcame these challenges with their project.
If I were to summarise Sara’s presentation it would cover three things, opportunities, challenges and recommendations:
OPPORTUNITIES:
- Over 103 million people in Bihar, India, including 27 million women of child bearing age;
- 80% of 15-49 year old men and women have access to a mobile phone
- 63% of men and 32% of women own a mobile phone
- 100% of community health workers have access to a mobile phone
CHALLENGES:
- Old, used, damaged, or basic mobile phones, where the majority of these ‘grey market’ copycat handsets do not support local language fonts
- High illiteracy level: 70% of women in rural Bihar are illiterate
- Low mobile literacy and very recent adoption of mobile technology: 91% of those surveyed have never sent an SMS
- Low disposable income to spend on phone calls: 53% of Bihar’s 103 million people live below the poverty line
RECOMMENDATIONS to achieve sustainable scale:
- Make it cheap, share revenue to cover costs and create value for advertisers
- Demonstrate value to the public sector
- Develop partnership for scale
Given that the above is only a snapshot from a huge learning that BBC Media Action achieved in Bihar, I highly recommend reading Yvone MacPherson and Sara Chamberlain’s recent Policy Briefing: ‘Health on the move: Can mobile phones save lives?’
[1] Overview of Mobile Kunji and Mobile Academy: launched by BBC Media Action in May 2012 in partnership with five mobile operators in India that represent close to 90% of the market in Bihar. Services were developed with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and with the support of the Government of Bihar – as part of the Ananya Programme. 78,000 people started using Mobile Kunji in the last 10 months, playing 1.58 million minutes of life-saving health content via their mobile phones. 22,000 people have begun the Mobile Academy training course, accessing 2 million minutes of health education content via their mobile phones. The services are now being scaled to the state of Odisha, with funding from the UK Government and with the support of the Government of Odisha.
*This was the title of Sara Chamberlain’s presentation at Mobile World Congress 2013.