Muhhamad Yunus, pioneer in microcredit, founder of the Grameen Bank, and Nobel Peace Prize winner, was a keynote speaker at the mHealth Summit last week. He described mobiles as an “Aladdin’s lamp” that can give women access to a digital genie. In the health and development arena, mobiles can indeed be a life-saving tool for women that can serve a number of functions from delivering information on stage of pregnancy to improving skills frontline health workers through mobile trainings.
On the opening day of the 2013 mHealth Summit, I attended a panel in the global health track on mobiles for women. This panel featured a rich discussion with panelists from MAMA, BBC Media Action, the Society of Elimination of Rural Poverty in India and the University of San Diego.
Of note for me were remarks made by Sara Chamberlain, Head of ICT from BBC Media Action, who talked about how important it is to understand the culture of the people we are trying to communicate with or develop a mobile solution for. She spoke about how people from media dark communities don’t organize and categorize information like societies who have access to libraries and the Internet do. Information is often more narrative and more driven by characters. People learn through identification with a character that takes them on a journey rather then just going through a hierarchical system of information. In the area in which she works as a partner on Anaya, which strives to improve maternal and child health in Bihar, India, 100% of the health workers have access to a mobile phone but most of their basic phones don’t support the local language. This made it difficult to develop and deliver trainings. They overcame this by launching a mobile academy that includes interactive voice response – or IVR- as well as audio visual job aids and audio messaging services. Of note are the early results in the mobile academy with more than 18,000 graduates. This is quite possibly the largest mobile-based training of this type. Their development process included putting the user at the center of the design.
This simple reminder about putting the end user at the center of design really resonated with me. All of our K4Health products are designed with the same principle in mind. We need to ensure we use the best format, language and delivery mechanism for our audiences. We need to remember to put the end user front and center if mobile programs are truly going to be the “Aladdin’s lamp” that Yunus spoke about.
This blog was originally published on the Knowledge for Health (K4Health) Project website. Republished with permission.