MoMoDar April 2nd Recap – Great dialogue on mHealth

MoMoDar April 2nd Recap – Great dialogue on mHealth

Last week Mobile Monday Dar es Salaam brought together 40 people interested in mHealth. We had three great presentations: Mr Marcos Mzeru from Ministry of Health and Social Welfare started with an overview of mHealth in Tanzania, followed by Peter Lubambi from D-Tree International sharing their experiences from reducing maternal mortality in Zanzibar with an mHealth approach, and finally Freddie Manento from Push Mobile Media Ltd brought the business perspective into developing mHealth apps. We were requested to share the presentations and all presenters agreed to share them online, so here you have are all the presentations and slides.

After the presentations there was active discussion and even a bit of colourful debate on what the audience exactly understood with the term mHealth and also what are the barriers of entry for mHealth applications to become more widespread. There have been and currently running many projects, but few are run on commercial basis. Freddie gave a great tutorial on what to think about when you want to build a successful commercial app. Just go through his presentation to see for yourself – It can be done! 

Many of mHealth applications are providing connectivity, guidance and information on health issues. This was the case for D-Tree’s mHealth application, which is reducing maternal mortality on Zanzibar. They created the app for traditional birth attendants (TBAs), not the mothers directly themselves. This was because the TBAs have respect in the communities and they are traditionally giving pregnant mothers advice and support. They can identify risky deliveries and arrange transport to hospitals for safer deliveries with the app. So far about 400 deliveries have been supported with the app and feedback from TBAs has been encouraging. Especially with this example, it was interesting to note that though most of the discussed health apps were targeted at women, there were quite few women in the audience.

What was great news to the mobile app developers, is that the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare is strongly involved in mHealth Tanzania Partnership – a public private partnership program where they hope to connect with mHealth application developers early on in the process so the Ministry’s interoperability and scalability requirements for nation-wide use would be considered in the development. In turn they can finance the development and buy the applications that are developed together. Mr Mzeru went as far to say that they will be happy to meet with any developer even with just an idea to see if it could be implemented under the partnership. They have also set up a community of mHealth practitioners to share knowledge and experiences, and they are communicating via an open Google Group called mHealth Tanzania that anyone can join.

It was a sweet event, but where should we go from here? What should be the theme for the next MoMoDar?

PS. In case you’re wondering that the television crew was doing in the event, they were filming the MoMo and interviewing some presenters and participants for a TBC program called ‘Tanzania Beyond 50 Years’. Maybe you’ll see yourself soon on television?! 🙂