Yearly Archives: 2014

One of the many paradoxes of 21st century medicine is the growing inequality of health care outcome. While recently published data by the International Comparison Program (ICP) has suggested that the global economic inequality has fallen sharply over the past few years, and economic growth has helped emerging economies to ‘catch up’ with the developed…

Our teams in Kibera and Makueni County are continuing their use of our REFER mobile web app. We’ve been looking at how it is used in practice by community health workers and their supervisors, known as CHEWs. I like this quote from one of the CHWs, which captures the idea nicely in her own words:…

It has been a busy week for the mCHW team, organizing and leading a breakfast panel and presenting findings from our interim project evaluation at the 2014 GETHealth Summit in Dublin, as well as at the Web 2.0 conference in Bilbao. It has been a great experience and has led to fruitful discussions around the…

[caption id="attachment_2406" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Mr. Benson visiting with a household in Makueni[/caption]   In my experience as a CHEW in Kibera I have found it very interesting to use technology to communicate with the community, the CHVs and my supervisor. The package on monitoring developmental milestones in children 0-59 months (under 5) has proved to…

On the return from a knowledge exchange visit to Makueni County, the health volunteers and community health extension workers (Kibera CHVs and CHEWs) were singing the whole way home. Inspired by that experience, they came up with the idea to form a community health choir to promote health messages in their community and beyond through…

Niall travelled to the UNESCO HQ for Mobile Learning Week 2014. His presentation (below) focused on how we must design technologies and training programmes to support the marginalised. He emphasised the need to address inequalities from the outset of any project or else run the risk of increasing structural inequality. He discussed how promoting the…

Jade Vu Henry will join the mCHW team as a doctoral researcher to document what happens during participatory design work. Her ethnographic research of design practices in mCHW will help us continually self-assess our on-going efforts to develop the most effective mobile-based learning tool possible. “Prior to beginning my doctoral studies at LKL, I worked as a public health evaluator…

By Niall Winters Let’s start by asking what is an appropriate technology? In many cases in ICT4D, it refers to the technology that is readily available to communities, and in the case most relevant to the mCHW project, this technology would be low-end mobile phones. Therefore, the usual starting point for many participatory and community-focused…

Niall Winters talking at the CTO (Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation) lunchtime seminar about ‘technology, education and development – a way forward’. Many thanks to Secretary General, Prof. Tim Unwin for the invitation to present.  

A recently published report by HEART suggests that a lack of evidence persists regarding how teaching practice changes as a result of edtech programmes. In a short Q & A session, one of the report’s contributors and PI of our project, Niall Winters, who recently moved from the London Knowledge Lab to take up a…