Malian Partners Share Findings on Mobile Technology for Health and Livelihoods
Mar 24 2010, Mali [ML], Livelihood opportunities, Health
- Source:
- Francois Laureys [flaureys(at)iicd.org]
- Country:
- Mali [ML]
- Sector:
- Livelihood opportunities, Health
IICD’s Malian project partners came together in February in Bamako to share their experiences with mobile technology in health and economic development. Apart from IICD’s project partners, a mobile phone provider and a representative of the ministry of health were present to give tips.
The seminar was organised by IICD because many of its Malian project partners have some experience with mobile technology, but wanted to know more about it. About 40 participants took part, and presentations were given by various partners.
Local partner IDC presented a solution that they developed to use mobile phones for sending and receiving agricultural information. A representative of service provider Orange talked about how national providers in Mali could be of service to local projects.
Practical advise was given and partners that are already working with mobile solutions such as Fruilema shared their findings. In this project PDAs and GPS are used to collect crop data.
“Everybody was enthusiastic after the seminar,” says Ousseni Zongo, Capacity Development Officer for IICD in Mali. “There is a lot of demand from partners to know more about mobile technology. With this session they really learned how to think about applying mobile technology in a sustainable way and how to use the technology to increase capacity.”