Health workers in Africa will no longer need to fill out long forms to monitor nutrition levels in the community, instead they can now use a mobile phone to text in the data, allowing government and aid agencies to rapidly intervene if the information shows a health crisis is developing.
According to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the "RapidSMS" system uses basic mobile phone technology like text messages to map and track child malnutrition trends in Malawi more accurately and in real time.
The new initiative developed by graduate students at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, was first used in Ethiopia to monitor food supplies. Using the same basic mobile phone technology principles, health practitioners in the southeast African country can share children's nutritional information by SMS, reducing the time necessary to detect famines.
However, text messaging in Malawi is not cheap, as each SMS costs 10 US cents. Stanley Chitekwe, UNICEF's nutrition manager said UNICEF "is in talks with the mobile phone service provider to make the service toll-free." In its defense, Christopher Fabian, co-head of UNICEF's Innovations and Development team, told IRIN that the service is still cheaper than the manual collection of data.
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