ITWeb: SMS for Life

A fantastic success that has generated a lot of media interest - this one from ITWeb

Tech giants fight malaria
IBM, Novartis and Vodafone have teamed up with the Roll Back Malaria Partnership to fight the spread of malaria in Tanzania.

The companies have started a five-month pilot called SMS for Life to help 135 villages and over a million people living in remote areas of Tanzania.

SMS for Life is a system which uses cellphones and Web sites to track the supply of anti-malarial vaccines coming into the country.

IBM CTO Clifford Foster says IBM's role in the partnership came about through its internship programme called Extreme Blue; a joint collaboration between local universities and their students.

The IBM team identified the need in Africa for a system that can manage the inventory of anti-malarial drugs, in order to make sure there is enough medication to help those with malaria.

Broader outlook
The pilot project, which started this year, is due to run until February. After that, Foster says the project will be assessed by the Tanzanian government and is expected to be expanded into other areas. Foster notes that the main objective, based on the success of the project, is to roll it out to the rest of Africa.

“Its one of those situations where innovation has risen out of need to solve a real problem,” he says. “The technology is cost-effective and is having a real impact on peoples' lives.

“Going forward, IBM will provide the project management using the IBM Lotus cloud-based solution in the support and execution of the project to make sure that the support services are executed at a low cost.”

SMS for supply
Vodafone's role, in conjunction with MatsSoft, was to develop a system in which healthcare staff in remote hospitals receive automated SMS messages prompting them to check the supply of anti-malarial drugs so they do not run out of the vital medicine.

Using toll-free numbers, staff reply with an SMS to a central database system hosted in the UK, providing details of stock levels, and deliveries can be made before supplies run out at local health centres.

Senior health officer at Tanzania's ministry of health and social welfare, Winfred Mwafongo, says the system has resulted in improvements in hospital inventory management systems in 19 rural health facilities in one district alone.

Fighting back
According to IBM, Tanzania has around 5 000 clinics, hospitals and dispensaries, but at any one time, as many as half could potentially be out of stock of anti-malarial drugs.

Designed as a public and private partnership leveraging the skills and resources of several companies, SMS for Life could have far-reaching implications for existing health systems worldwide. Several other African countries have shown interest in the project.

The mosquito-borne disease causes nearly one million deaths in Africa each year, mostly among pregnant women and young children, and many people die because they simply lack quick access to vital medication.

SMS for Life

I am truly impressed by the SMS for Life pilot - it demonstrates how the smart use of technology can have a profound impact on the lives of people in Africa.

Background
The first phase of a joint IBM, Novartis and Vodaphone initiative, called SMS for Life, has been delivered in Tanzania.

One million people die from malaria each year in Africa and this initiative will help to ensure that people can get the life-saving drugs they need. The project uses a combination of mobile phones, SMS technologies and electronic mapping to track and help manage the supply of drugs.

The solution
The idea is to report stock levels of anti-malaria drugs using weekly SMS messages. The information is then displayed in tables, graphs and on Google Maps, and email alerts are generated for health facilities which are out of stock of any of the drugs being tracked. Supply chain coordinators then use this information to determine how best to resolve the stock issues.

Early findings in the first district to go live indicate out-of-stock levels at more than 55%, confirming initial assumptions.

The solution, which may even appear trivial in the developed world, is actually ideal in its African context and meets the needs of those for whom it has been designed. "And now we have the makings of a successful pilot, we could see this solution rolled out across much of sub-Saharan Africa over the next few years", believes Peter Ward of IBM. "That really would be a great result for everyone involved!"

Additional information
Rollback Malaria article

ITWeb: Thinking smarter in the cloud

Alex Kayle posted this write-up post the recent ITWeb Cloud Computing Conference

Organisations are spending up to 70% of their IT budget on simply keeping the organisation running, and this has serious financial implications for the business.

Clifford Foster, CTO at IBM sub-Saharan Africa, explored the synergies between cloud computing, software-as-a-service, virtualisation and service-oriented architecture, during yesterday's ITWeb Cloud Computing conference in Bryanston.

Foster called for businesses to think smarter about managing their technology differently, in order to keep up with the exponential growth of data. “The world is changing and is becoming increasingly instrumented.

“We have about 33 billion RFID tags sold globally. We are gathering information in real-time and everything is becoming interconnected. We have four billion mobile subscribers, two billion Internet users, and we have a trillion interconnected devices.”

Solving problems
Foster pointed out that cloud computing is capable of helping organisations solve many of their business problems: “We have information generated and managed on such a scale so we can prevent problems before they happen, prevent power outages, and water contamination.”

Foster said IDC research reveals that 85% of computing capacity stands idle in computer centres, which results in a waste of energy resources. He added that cloud computing brings cost benefits to IT, as the hosted environment is provided on a pay-per-use basis as a services contract.

“Cloud computing is not new. However, cloud computing involves a paradigm-shift that catalyses many existing technologies and approaches.

“Cloud computing is an infrastructure management and services delivery methodology. We are truly at the point