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Mobile Solutions for Nutrition Monitoring
Presenter: Mr. Sean Blaschke, Grad Student, International Affairs, Columbia University

Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) is partnering with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) to develop and implement an innovative open source, mobile phone based monitoring platform to address critical gaps in Malawian health care provision. Working with the Ministry of Health in Malawi, we are revamping their early warning famine surveillance system, employing affordable and readily available mobile technologies to empower local stakeholders with the tools necessary to effectively monitor nutrition conditions in their region. In addition, our project will enable the Government of Malawi, UNICEF Malawi, and their partners to geographically map and track child malnutrition trends accurately and in real time. Our goal is to eliminate the current three month gap between data collection and analysis, significantly decrease costs by eliminating capital intensive form collection and centralized data entry, and improve data quality through an incentive based system that provides stakeholders at all levels with valuable and instantaneous feedback. Between January and April 2009, we are piloting the platform in Malawi at growth monitoring clinics in three districts. If successful, the pilot will serve as a model to scale up the use of mobile devices in other nutrition and food security surveillance systems worldwide. This collaborative project between SIPA and UNICEF recently won first place in USAID’s 2008 Development 2.0 Challenge.

Contact: smb2176@columbia.edu

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Thu, April 16, 2009:
interesting : I thought malawi was one of the countries not yet sufficiently served by mobiles- am I wrong - would you be interested in partnering with country's lead microcredit http://www.microloanfoundation.org -know the founder, & MIT partners