A Bright Future for Telemedicine and Distance Learning

As the Managing Director of IICD, I participated in the end of January in the World Bank’s “ICT Sector Week: Enabling Development” in Washington. This event was organised by the World Bank’s Global Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Department for the Bank’s staff and the staff of the International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank Group.

The purpose of the week was to engage IFC and WB staff, senior industry executives, and sector experts in discussion how to leverage ICT to scale up the development impact of the ICF and WB operations. 

Strategy sessions were held on increasing the reach and impact of services in public sector management, education, health, agriculture and rural development.

IICD was involved as speaker in the ICT for Health session and contributed to the panel discussion of the agriculture and rural development session. I also presented IICD in the ICT for Education session.

Find below my personal findings on the Health and Education sessions.

Working towards innovative health services delivery

The workshop on health was very interesting and included participants with lots of experience and key positions. After a well-received presentation the participants discussed: What is e-health? What long term commitment do we need from the bank? What is the role of, amongst others, health insurance and privacy of data?

A much respected female senior advisor of the World Bank suggested that the World Bank thinks about new ways to deliver health services in developing countries. She pointed out that the WB should not be willing to finance projects that are just replicating what was done in the past in the ‘North’. From this point of view she considered that there was a bright future for telemedicine and distance learning education.

“ICT is giving the opportunity to review what is done and to explore what should be possible and what should be adapted to the context of the developing countries.”

My view and experience on this is that ICT create opportunities for institutions in developing countries to do health service delivery in an innovative way: not matching Northern traditions but to be answering institutions’ own specific challenges. IICD is working much in line with this. What IICD is doing in the health sector attracted positive attention in particular because of our integrated approach (guiding principles or what I call ‘true capacity building’). Examples of our work within health services delivery are the Teleradiology project in Mali and the Telemedicine project in Tanzania.

Moving towards smart use of ICT in Education

As is already the case in the area of health services delivery, ICT is creating opportunities for developing countries to do education delivery in an innovative way: not according to Northern approaches but responding to its own specific challenges. The World Bank staff has an advisory role to governments in developing countries and should be prepared for these opportunities.

For IICD, it is worth to think about: do we want to mainstream ICT in education (using ICT to help teachers in their traditional education approach to make their work more attractive for the students) or do we want to stand in a new education paradigm (providing opportunities for innovative approaches) and look at how ICTs can play a role for this purpose? At the moment we are involved in both ways of developing education.

The current education system is a product of the industrial revolution, from 200 years ago. How will today’s digital revolution shape the future’s education? Education should be designed to help students to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.