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.
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