In late 2010, there was a ground-breaking summit held in Accra, Ghana, which focused on the growing sector of mHealth on the African continent, an event I wrote about at the time.  It brought together practitioners, policy makers, and service providers in one place to chart a course forward.  In reflection of that meeting, I am most excited about the real progress being shown not by donors or technology providers, but by governments.

I’ve been to many mHealth gatherings and presentations lately, including the sessions during the International Conference on Family Planning in Dakar and the mHealth Working Group meetings in Washington. Several messages keep coming up. In Dakar, they were from a gathering of approximately 25 mHealth colleagues, mainly practitioners. The "pearls" or short lessons learned from past and present experiences included:

Recently, while in Swaziland to assist the Soka Uncobe Project in developing a toolkit containing project materials and essential information on male circumcision, I was fortunate enough to attend the Nkamanzi Community Info Centre launch. While I did not understand every piece of the program due to many speeches being given in the local language, SiSwati, I discerned that they were giving praises to the implementing partners, including Knowledge for Health (K4Health), SAfAIDS, and NERCHA. Hearing high-level officials speak about the very project I work on while sitting on a mountainside in Swaziland was quite special to me.

The event location was beautifully situated on one of the many mountains in Swaziland within the Nkamanzi community. The conference was well attended with community members, children, and government officials.   

Rural households in low-income countries often use expensive, unsafe, inefficient, and smoky kerosene-burning lamps as their only source of light, but new solar powered technology is coming to the aid of at least some of the approximately 1.6 billion people (over one-fifth of the world population) who don’t have access to grid electricity.