HealthPhone Promoting Healthy Communities

By Cameroon Link
HealthPhone is coming soon to village, town, city, slum, block, district, state, province, country near you! Mobile phones pre-loaded with reliable, relevant, contextually-appropriate, comprehensive, consistent health and nutrition knowledge and know-how delivered directly to individuals, families and communities, even those – especially those – who live in villages and slums and those that are illiterate. Available 24x7, Everywhere! Multimedia health and nutrition content, downloadable Apps., distribution networks and much more under development.
The uncomfortable reality is that we live in a world where there is a Silent emergency every day: 22,000 children will die from preventable causes today. 1,000 women will die from pregnancy-related causes today. This year, 4 million newborns worldwide will die in the first month of life.
The silent killers that will take away their lives are poverty, hunger, easily preventable diseases and illnesses, and related causes. Five diseases – pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria, measles and AIDS – together account for half of all deaths of children under 5. Hundreds, if not thousands, of excellent projects are being implemented in both rural and urban parts of the world. Some serve a village, while others serve a group of villages, a city, a town, a taluka, a block or a district. Yet few projects are implemented state-wide and even fewer nationwide. Why is that? A key factor is capacity-building and scaling-up.
Health education has to be one of the most effective ways to reduce maternal and child mortality, those preventable deaths that we never seem to manage to prevent. We need to deliver vital messages and information for mothers, fathers, siblings, caregivers and communities to use in changing behaviour and practices: messages that can save and protect the lives of children and help them grow and develop to their full potential.
For the illiterate, currently their only source of information is probably going to be the people around you, who are also, in many cases, illiterate. Their level of dependency and lack of self-reliance, their dis-empowerment and exclusion, is at a level that many of us will find hard to imagine.
The mobile phones have made connection possible in ways that were truly unthinkable very recently. And it has stoked the desire of people to be connected. Take India for example: with a population of 1.17 billion and a wireless user base of about 700 million, and growing at the rate of 15 to 20 million a month. "Cell Phone penetration will reach 97% by 2014", according to a recent study. Soon, almost everybody will have one.
This is a game-changer for capacity-building and scaling up. It means we can reach the excluded, the illiterate, all those women, men and children who were only visible in tragic statistics. We can reach families and communities as a whole - something we've never really been able to do before.
HealthPhone has health and nutrition knowledge, prepared jointly by UNICEF, WHO, UNESCO, UNFPA, UNDP, UNAIDS, WFP and The World Bank, on Timing Births, Safe Motherhood and Newborn Health, Child Development and Early Learning, Breastfeeding, Nutrition and Growth, Immunization, Diarrhoea, Coughs Colds and More Serious Illnesses, Hygiene, Malaria, HIV, Child Protection, Injury Prevention, Emergencies: preparedness and response.
Initial content in English and 15 Indian Languages: Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, Tamil Telugu and Urdu. Watch the intro video at http://healthphone.org