ICT4D News Roundup – April 14th, 2017
Welcome to our weekly #ICT4D News Roundup!
Highlighted articles this week:
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- What does it mean to be a “systems entrepreneur?” Hear from the CEO of Last Mile Health on what it takes to move from social to systems entrepreneurship. – Devex
- How will an app help Rainforest Alliance improve training for 1.3 million farmers worldwide? – The Rainforest Alliance
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- Need help developing a business development pipeline? Don’t start from scratch — check out Dimagi’s new toolkit first. – ICTworks
- New research suggests that mobile phones can help improve health outcomes for HIV/AIDS patients. – Medical Xpress
Q&A: CEO OF LAST MILE HEALTH ON BECOMING A SYSTEMS ENTREPRENEUR
Last Mile Health, an organization with roots in Liberia, strives to improve public health by supporting and training community health workers, so they can provide the best care to their communities. While the organization is currently working in one country, Raj Panjab, co-founder and CEO of Last Mile Health, believes the lessons Last Mile Health has learned with its government partners could be applied to public health projects around the world. Panjab refers to this as systems entrepreneurship, where cross-sector collaborations enable large-scale change. In this interview with devex at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, he elaborates on this idea.
There’s also a need for a change and reorientation in work values, which is to put the success of the cause over the success of the organization. It’s not that the organization doesn’t need to be successful, but it should be seen as a means to achieve success for the cause.”
SCALING UP SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE THROUGH TECHNOLOGY: THE RAINFOREST ALLIANCE LAUNCHES FARMER TRAINING APP
Our partners at Rainforest Alliance, an organization that seeks to “conserve biodiversity and ensure sustainable livelihoods,” recently launched a farmer training app using CommCare to help support the rollout of the revised Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN) certification standard. The CommCare app will help smallholder farmers learn more about the new SAN criteria and sustainable farming methods.
That’s the exciting part of this project; that we can reach millions of farmers with one simple tool. It is our hope that technology can help bridge a gap and enable smallholder farmers to leave a sustainable farm for future generations.”
Read the full article on rainforest-alliance.org
For more background on this project, and the app Rainforest Alliance built on CommCare, check out their video here. Learn more about how mobile solutions can be used in the agriculture sector here.
NEW BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT PIPELINE TOOLKIT
We are pleased to release our Business Development Toolkit, which describes the approach we honed for managing a pipeline of business opportunities. Our approach tracks opportunities of varying size, timelines, and likelihood of succeeding, and how to use this information to prioritize business development efforts and estimate the future value of current opportunities.
Over the last 15 years, our team has implemented hundreds of projects, which required managing thousands of business opportunities. As a social enterprise, handling this process efficiently and consistently is a core element of our success and a key factor in why our open source mobile platform, CommCare, is actively used in our 60 countries today.”
MOBILE PHONES IMPROVE OUTCOMES FOR HIV-POSITIVE PEOPLE ACROSS THE GLOBE
This new paper, published by researchers at the University of Albany, and our very own Claire Cravero, Senior Field Manager at Dimagi, shows the impact mobile devices can have on communities living with HIV. The study found that text messages helped remind participants to attend medical appointments.
The use of mobile technology shows great promise for those who are HIV-positive, especially among those who have limited resources and those in poor areas of the world.”
With mobile solutions, providers can help identify and track HIV-positive patients, provide behavior change counseling messages, send SMS reminders for antiretroviral therapy (ART), and improve HIV-related follow-up adherence. Learn more here.
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