mHealth landscape in Tanzania

1 May 2012

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Before I left for Tanzania, I received a number of “Where?” / “Tasmania?” / “I had to Google Tanzania” remarks. I therefore benchmarked my location via Kenya, our much more familiar neighbouring country to the north. Kenya has iHub amongst a number of other prominent mobile initiatives and Tanzania? We’re not quite there but have certainly not been left out of the flourishing mHealth space.

Tanzania is unique in that the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (MoHSW) has appointed a dedicated National mHealth Coordinator who oversees mHealth initiatives rolled out throughout the country. Initiatives led and coordinated by the mHealth Coordinator include:

  1. mHealth Community of Practice - regular gathering comprised of practitioners, researchers and partners who meet regularly to discuss projects and current topics in mHealth
  2. mHealth Tanzania Partnership – connecting with mHealth developers to ensure alignment with the Ministry’s interoperability and scalability requirements for nation-wide use would be considered in the development. As mentioned in the latest Mobile Monday in Dar es Salaam, the Ministry “can finance the development and buy the applications that are developed together” and are “happy to meet with any developer even with just an idea to see if it could be implemented under the partnership.”
I’ve attended mHealth CoP meetings in the past and have found the meetings to be useful, especially for organizations developing new mHealth projects to get a sense of what has been done in the past and what is currently being done. It’s a chance to learn from successful projects such as SMS for Life, discuss challenges such as ongoing network outages and collectively craft the country’s mHealth strategy.
I remember attending my first mHealth CoP meeting and carrying along the following two takeaways:
  1. There is A LOT of duplication of efforts happening. Many attendees pitched their projects and a large number were identified as already being done or having already been done by another organization. Landscape analysis is a must.
  2. Clinics in Dar es Salaam must be involved in a number of pilots. Pilotitis – it’s the biggest disease in mHealth for a reason.
Although a few paces behind Kenya, Tanzania is able to observe the successes and failures of other countries and programs and iterate accordingly. Beyond NGOs and the MoHSW, the private sector (including major mobile network operators) are also investing in the mHealth space. With the collective interest on mHealth and the focused initiatives led by the mHealth National Coordinator, Tanzania is well on it’s way to maturing the space and being a leader for including mHealth into the overall country-wide health strategy.

By: admin Category: Reflection Tags: , ,