The year 1992 was a time of change for Ghana. A coalition government brought hope of a prosperous and democratic future for a country whose past is blighted by coups and corruption. It was also the year the mobile phone came to Ghana.
In this first year, just 19,000 Ghanaians owned mobile phones (GhanaWeb, 2011). Today the figure is estimated to be 7.6 million – a third of the entire population (ITU, 2009). Now an innovative new scheme hopes to harness this prolific rise to improve antenatal and neonatal care.
Mobile Technology for Community Health (Motech) was launched in July 2010 in the upper-east region of Ghana, funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It is now being rolled out across the central region of the country this December.
The scheme, is run by the non-profit Grameen Foundation and involves pregnant women registering by providing their phone number, area in which they live, their estimated due date and language preference. They then receive information and advice via text and voice messages.
Tim Wood, director of the foundation’s mobile health innovation unit, said: ‘The idea here is to engage the pregnant parents more... so that they will seek more antenatal care.’
He added: ‘We’re not distributing mobile phones to patients; there’s a high enough mobile phone ownership and penetration even in these remote, rural parts of Ghana that we think we can reach people without handing out mobile phones.’
The messages that the parents receive include general information – such as the location of the closest health facility and treatments that they should receive – as well as messages tailored to a woman’s antenatal history.
Patricia Mechael, an expert in the use of mobile technology in medicine, was commissioned to prepare a report (Mechael and Dodowa Health Research Centre, 2009) on the scheme. She concluded that Ghana is well-suited for this project because the government ‘is becoming a bigger user of mobile tech solutions’.
‘Now we’re starting to see a much more active role of the government to define and drive home how technology can be applied for health. And that’s an incredibly positive change,’ she said.
But that’s not to say that the project hasn’t had its problems. For example, many Ghanaians claim to have a mobile phone but it is often shared with an entire family, drastically limiting access. There have also been issues around getting nurses on board.
A Motech progress report (Grameen Foundation, 2011) stated: ‘We found that, initially, nurses did not recognise automated reports as an incentive. In fact, nurses were requesting us to buy lunch for them in return for the extra work Motech was making them do, and some even asked for money.’
While the scheme still needs honing and the report admits its first year was ‘fraught with unforeseen challenges’, it states that lessons have been learned and Motech has ‘great potential to make a difference in the lives of the poorest’.
References
International Telecommunications Union. (2009)
Measuring the information society: The ICT development index. ITU: Geneva. See:
http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/publications/idi/2009/material/IDI2009_w5.pdf (accessed 14 November 2011).
GhanaWeb. (2011)
Telephones and communication. See:
http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/communication (accessed 14 November 2011).
Mechael PN, the Dodowa Health Research Center for the Grameen Foundation. (2009)
MoTECH: MHealth ethnography report. See:
http://www.grameenfoundation.applab.org/uploads/Grameen_Foundation_FinalReport_3_.pdf (accessed 14 November 2011).
Grameen Foundation, MoTECH. (2011)
Mobile technology for community health in Ghana: what it is and Grameen Foundation has learned so far. See:
http://www.mobileactive.org/files/MOTECH-Early-Lessons-Learned-March-2011-FINAL.pdf (accessed 14 November 2011).
