Big World, Small World
The Ministry of Health and the National Malaria Control Program (NMCP), the Support to National Malaria Program (SuNMaP) , UNICEF, and a whole host of other acronymed organizations are rolling out the largest ever distribution of bednets in Africa over the next two years, and have chosen to integrate RapidSMS into their program for real-time monitoring and tracking of nets as they travel across the country for the pilot in Kano state. Just the pilot program, encompassing a half of one of Nigeria’s 36 states, looks to distribute over two-million insecticide treated nets, which, in layman’s terms, is “a whole lot”.
We’re thrilled to be working on this project, and the enthusiasm we received from the local team on our system was extremely satisfying. UNICEF Innovations Group and Dimagi just completed facilitating a 4-day workshop in Abuja that provided an overview of RapidSMS at its use.
The workshop consisted of an extremely diverse group of people, including higher-ups working for various government agencies, UNICEF staff assisting in the operation, university students from Lagos, and Abuja, and people we met on the Internet.
That’s right people we met on the Internet.
Ok, technically we didn’t meet them. Evan Wheeler, one of our colleagues working for UNICEF did. Evan was “researching the local programming scene” and through a series of popular and local social networks somehow got in touch with two developers based out of Lagos and convinced his supervisors to invite them to the workshop. Think “Tweet tweet. Cory is off to Abuja to learn about RapidSMS!”
So what was the result? Well they learned Python over the weekend, took a crash course in Django, and within two days they were churning out a brand-new AJAX interface to RapidSMS that enabled real-time testing of any RapidSMS application in the confines of a web browser. In non-programming terms, that means making it a whole lot easier for developers and non-developers alike to learn and work with RapidSMS. Tim Akimbo’s new code was demonstrated in one of the modules before the workshop was even over! Needless to say, everyone is trying their hardest to get these guys to continue working on the project now that the workshop’s over…
So, as we continue to think about how the heck we’re going to assist in managing and tracking the distribution of trucks, people, coupons, and millions of malaria nets across Nigeria, someone can pick up a computer in New York and somehow find an amazing programmer in a city with 8 million or so people and convince them to work with us one week later.
Now that’s how you get local ownership of an open source project.
Below are some photos from the workshop.
Share
Tags
Similar Articles
Announcing the High-Impact Growth Podcast
In the last 20 years, we’ve learned a lot about the role of technology in global health and development--through successes and failures. As an open source company, we’ve also sought to share what we learn along the way, primarily through our blog as well as at conferences and events. Today, we are announcing a new way that we’ll be sharing: the High-Impact Growth Podcast.
Staff Blog
June 7, 2022
How Digital Solutions Can Help Scale Mental Health Care
It is not difficult to see the potential contribution of offering digital solutions to improve mental health care given the staggering unmet need, the increased efforts to meet this need, and the high likelihood of digital being integral to delivering and scaling effective mental health interventions.
Staff Blog
May 18, 2022
Thriving in a Hybrid World
In many ways Dimagi was a hybrid organization before we knew what it was to be hybrid. With three hub offices, partners spread all over the world, and with a good portion of the team traveling at any given time, team meetings and partner engagement have included remote participation for all of Dimagi’s 20 year history.
Staff Blog
May 12, 2022