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A Healthy Africa
Submitted by Team Seacom on Tue, 2010/01/12 - 10:19
What can Africa do with faster broadband?
Faster broadband for Africa means African ideas and innovations can move faster. It means we can more easily collaborate, educate, train and share.
This is according to Pape Gaye, President and CEO of IntraHealth International, a US-based organisation that provides health care workers around the globe with training, support and infrastructure. “The IntraHealth OPEN initiative aims to assist African governments and private institutions design and apply open source solutions to strengthen their ability to use health information for strategic health policy and planning. Faster broadband means African developers can more effectively use open source technology to help solve the greatest global health issues of our time.”
“For IntraHealth International it means health workers can get critical data in time to save lives.”
IntraHealth International has offices in 32 countries around the world, providing invaluable support to local communities and helping them find sustainable solutions to their public health problems.
IntraHealth is adamant that faster broadband means increased efficiency, faster innovation, less frustration, increased adoption of useful technological tools, and the growth of local development and enterprise in mHealth, eHealth, open source and proprietary software development for global health.
“All of these are very important and contribute to better country-wide health systems, better efficiency within a health system, better data for policy makers, funders, doctors and patients. Ultimately this means better health outcomes overall and better quality of life.”
Fulfilling an urgent need
•800 million people worldwide lack access to health service
•57 countries have far fewer health care workers than the minimum standard (5 for every 10,000 people) needed to provide even the most basic health care
•Africa bears 24% of the world's burden of disease with only 3% of the global health workforce
•Asia has 50% of the world's population but only 30% of the doctors, nurses and midwives.
Sources: WHO, Anyangwe and Mtonga.
IntraHealth was one of 30 entrants into SEACOMs broadband competition. The submission received from them was outstanding and received a massive 11352 votes from the public. Although IntraHealth could not be considered for the competition, SEACOM has been impressed by the work the company does and the amount of votes they garnered in the competition. Their entry “Faster Broadband translates into lives saved” can be found here.
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re: A Healthy Africa
With faster broadband, people will be able to be updated in what is going on around the world and it would be good for people who have a business there. A successful business over the long term does not happen by accident. It behooves anyone, in any business regardless of size or specific industry, to employ strategic planning. First, you have to set your goals, long and short term, and incorporate them into your mission statement. From there, you have to break it down into all its constituent parts, and what it will take to get there, in every avenue from advertising, production and finance. Using a little business planning can keep you from needing short term loans down the line, and create increased revenue over the lifetime of the business.
Broadband
It is a good idea to have broadband in Africa, and there are plenty of possibilities, but the question remains how do you utilize the broadband service which rely on electricity. We all know that electricity is a big problem in Africa. Secondly internet providers are getting greedy by overcharging. I will give an example, someone struggled to send me a simple PDF document which wasn't more than 2MB. in the end he had to send the document in bits. The issue of a Healthy Africa is a big one. how will the use of broadband improve health in Africa I do not know. First of all get African leaders to build hospitals starting with really basic health care. When I was growing up in Uganda there were small clinics known as dispensaries. these dispensaries disappeared long time ago. Let me give you an another example, The president of Nigeria is in the Middle East being treated there, Mwalimu Julias Nyerere died at St Thomas Hospital, what does that tell you, an educated person will know the answer
Broadband is good when the infrastructure of the country is in place.
High speed Net
high speed Internet connection means the entire world in your house and office. no more business and education boundaries. luck of Internet connection Africa was left behind, this is the thing we were all waiting for, thanks to Seacom.
ginoscar