SMS for life: le téléphone mobile au service de la santéNews:
SMS for Life - First major success in Lindi Rural District, Tanzania
Health Worker Training in Kigoma
Walking the distance between Dalila's home and the Health Facility takes two hours. Dalila knows it well. For years she has trudged the red dirt road under the burning sun or in torrential rains. She knows every twist and turn of the road, every hill and hollow on the way. She sets out in hope but finishes her journey in disappointment and despair. Sometimes she returns home with the medicines needed by her family but more often she comes back empty-handed.
Dalila does not need to know the official statistics that show that in Tanzania one person dies from malaria every five minutes. She has seen sickness and death in her own family and in her village. Husbands, wives, children – relations and friends - that could have been saved. Many of these people had accompanied her down that road to the Health Facility, walking in hope like she does. They were often told that the Facility did not have the malaria medicines they needed, that supplies had not arrived, that stocks had not been replenished. They too had returned empty-handed. And Malaria had won. Dalila had often asked herself why. Why couldn't she, her family and others in her village get existing medicines that prevent and treat malaria? Earlier this year a team from SMS for Life had arrived at the Health Centre. They had promised that things would change.
SMS for Life aims to help people like Dalila. The project's idea is to link text messaging over mobile phones with Internet and Google Maps to manage stocks of anti-malarial drugs in public health facilities. During its first visit in May 2009, the SMS for Life team met and consulted with a wide range of health and community workers and local people to put the idea to the test. The response was encouraging
.In September SMS for Life launched a pilot project in three Districts – Ulanga, Kigoma, and Lindi. Since then more than 155 health workers and District Managers have been trained.
The effort is bearing fruit. In Dalila's district, Lindi Rural, one half of all Health Facilities, including hers, were frequently out of stock. Now, just nine weeks into the 21-week pilot all 47 health facilities have full stocks of all the 5 anti-malarial drugs that Dalila needs.
Dalila's district, covering over half a million people and 60 villages, is likely to become the first District in Tanzania, where all children with malaria have full access to the life saving medicines they need when they need them. Similar progress has been marked in the other two pilot Districts.
Now, when Dalila walks the dusty road to the Health Facility she can walk not in hope but in certainty. She will come home with the live-saving medicines her family needs.