I have been working in Malawi for about six months now, and though I miss home (Oregon), I am beginning to feel comfortable and increasingly productive here. Malawi is a wonderful place to work. I have met many good people and seen much of the land. I have yet to explore so much more, but I have been very busy and very content with work.
Last Thursday, February 4th, I had the fortunate opportunity to present at a National Data Standards Meeting, convened at the Cresta Hotel in Lilongwe by Chris Moyo of the Central Monitoring and Evaluation Division of Malawi’s Ministry of Health. These slides offer a brief overview of FrontlineSMS:Medic’s evolution in Malawi, the current work that has kept me busy for the last six months, a few lessons learned, and some of our vision and strategy for the future.
If you have questions, ideas, critiques, or general feedback, I’d love to see it in the comments or on Twitter.
Note: If you click through to this presentation on slideshare.net, you can select the Notes tab underneath the presentation to see more or less the full text of this talk.
I presented these slides at the Scotland Malawi Partnership Conference at City Chambers in Edinburgh, Scotland, 2009. If you are interested in the slides, particularly if you were able to attend the conference, I encourage you to contact me with follow up questions.
The short one-day conference was great. A few interesting tid bits I learned: More than half of all international health and development aid from the Scottish government goes to Malawi. Until Malawi began to build its first medical school just a few decades ago, most Malawian doctors were trained in St. Andrews. Blantyre (Malawi’s largest city) was named after Blantyre, Scotland, the birth-place of Dr. David Livingston. Dr. Livingston (of the oft’ quoted question “Dr. Livingston, I presume?”) was a Scottish Doctor who was the first European to explore much of East Africa, and his story is at the root of much of the long relationship between Scotland and Malawi. It was great being at a conference with so many people with extensive experience working in Malawi, and I particularly enjoyed meeting Maeghan Ray and the other conference organizers and speakers.
Since the conference I’ve been as busy as ever, meeting up with Ken Banks in Cambridge, visiting Dutch friends and host family that I hadn’t seen since I was an exchange student in the Netherlands (4 years ago!), and most recently re-launching the FrontlineSMS:Medic website.
Isaac Holeman (Me!), giving FrontlineSMS:Medic’s final pitch at the Netsquared conference, 2009.
I was fortunate enough to attend the Netsquared conference in 2008 with the featured project Squarepeg, and it was a wonderful experience. We didn’t take home a top cash prize that year, but I learned so much and met so many great people. So when I helped get FrontlineSMS:Medic started and we were in the process of meeting new people, continuing to explore our field, and looking for funding, I knew the opportunity to attend N2Y4 would be great. The community certainly didn’t disappoint. I feel like I am a slightly more thoughtful person for having had the pleasure of brain-storming, competing, laughing, eating, and drinking with all of you for this short whirlwind conference.
Our team also walked away from the conference with our first major organizational funding: the $25k top prize based on the Netsquared conference vote, the top $15K prize from the Microsoft Mobile Development Challenge, and a $5K social justice award from the French American Charitable Trust (FACT). Thank you, thank you, thank you, and THANK YOU!
For all of our friends who could not attend the conference and for those of you who attended and are (like us) still trying to piece together a flurry of ideas and experiences into a few memorable lessons, I’d like to share a few observations about why I think we were successful.
APT stands for Accesible Para Todos (Accessible For All in Spanish): Sasha from VozMob coined (I think) this tech acronym during his closing pitch, and I picked it up just minutes later during our closing pitch, using it to describe FrontlineSMS:Medic. What does APT mean for us? We’re working with a platform that is optimized for low-end and prevalent phones, that supports many roman and non-roman languages, and we’re trying to bring these tools to people who might not be able to access them without a little support.
Often the very DNA of an innovation (for example, look to our friends The Extraordinaries, also winners at this conference) requires a tool like a smart phone that just isn’t going to be accessible to everyone. That’s okay. But all of us can brainstorm about how to become more APT, and it was wonderful to have the Netsquared community affirm all the thought we’ve put into this topic.
We’re young and scrappy: I’m 23, and no one on our team is much older. On one hand, this means we know how to gird ourselves in caffeine and put the pedal to the metal 24/7 when we have a deadline. On the other hand, our project doesn’t have an MD, PhD, or M.A. at the helm. Many people would see that as a risk for such an ambitious project, and perhaps they would be right. The Netsquared voters, Microsoft, and FACT all decided to trust the core platform we work with, our successful pilot, and the passion with which we speak about our work rather than some of the traditional credentials of experience and expertise (initials like MD). Thank you for taking that risk, for being committed to meritocracy. We’re going to work tirelessly over the next year to prove your investment worthwhile. To that end… why don’t you help us succeed!
Here are a few ways you can help:
1) Go to hopephones.org, print out a pre-paid shipping label, and send us your old mobile phone so that we can repurpose it for global health. Consider contacting us to get a donation box at your work, school, or Church. If you blog or tweet, why not let the world know about our recycling campaign?
2) If you are a developer, designer, global health activist, philanthropist, or experienced entrepreneurial type, and are interested in contributing, we’d love to see how you can help. If you gave us a card or email at the conference, don’t worry, we’ll be in touch ;-)
Thank you once more friends and funders for an incredible conference.
- Isaac
I'm a co-founder and the Malawi-based Field Director for FrontlineSMS:Medic, a nonprofit I started with a few friends to help health workers use mobile phones to improve care in under served communities. I recently completed a bachelors degree in biochemistry & molecular biology at Lewis & Clark, and will be working in Malawi for at least a year before I move back to the US for medical school. I enjoy informatics, global health, anthropology, serial entrepreneurship, and red letter Christians. I love my job, though I miss my beloved Cascadia. You can learn more about me by checking out my photographs, or by following me on twitter.
