WHO finds social media indispensable in managing global health crises

Inside SHOC, the "situation room" of the World Health Organization.

NOTE: This article was first published on the Huffington Post on May 21, 2012.

GENEVA, Switzerland -- This month I was visiting the Strategic Health Operations Centre (SHOC), deep inside the World Health Organization. SHOC is WHO's equivalent of the White House Situation Room, where a multi-disciplinary team of experts gather to access and share information that enable rapid situation assessment and decision-making during global pandemics and other health crises.

Along with an impressive array of state-of-the-art communications, collaboration and coordination tools were four large screens for monitoring crises. I was fascinated to see that one of them displayed TweetDeck, the application that facilitates Twitter searches by selected key words or phrases.

WHO uses social media to manage global health crises, I asked Christine Feig, WHO's head of communications? Yes, they are, and she recounted a tale of how social media have fundamentally changed WHO health surveillance in the age of Twitter and Facebook. WHO's seminal social media event occurred the last time the SHOC was staffed 24/7 -- the Japanese tsunami and Fukushima radiation crisis of 2011. Here's how it played out:

On March 14, three days after the tsunami hit Japan, WHO observed via social media that some people were drinking wound cleaner, which contains iodine, because it was thought to protect them from radiation. Via Twitter and Facebook, the WHO social media team warned people not to drink it -- that it would not help and could be harmful.

Do you think you know where faith groups stand on family planning? Think again

This husband and wife are World Vision-trained community health workers in India who advocate birth spacing. They began using family planning when their son (right) was born.

NOTE: This blog was originally published on Impatient Optimists, the blog of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, on April 3, 2012.

Religious leaders from a diversity of faiths—Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, and Hindus—have come together to profess support for family planning access around the world. This multi-faith support for family planning is something we simply don’t hear enough about in the United States. But we should.

Last year in Kenya, an interfaith meeting led by Christian Connections for International Health (CCIH) of the U.S., Deutsche Stiftung Weltbevoelkerung of Germany, and Muhammadiyah of Indonesia resulted in an “Interfaith Declaration” unanimously endorsed by well over 200 Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist religious leaders.

The declaration expressed clear support for providing couples with the information and means to plan the timing and spacing of their children “consistent with their faith,” and called on others to support this initiative to influence government and donor policies and funding.

The truth is that faith-based organizations have been providing health care and even family planning for decades.

NGOs can also contribute to innovative financing

DKT advertises IUDs in Indonesia.

NOTE: This blog was originally published on Impatient Optimists, the blog of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, on Feb. 2, 2012.

In difficult economic times like these, governments are looking for ways to cut their budgets. Foreign aid is often an easy target. Innovative financing—the idea of using a range of non-traditional tools such as micro-contributions, taxes, and public-private partnerships—has developed over the last 10 years as an alternative to traditional donor aid. Innovative financing mechanisms have raised $2 billion over three years, according to a 2010 report, mostly for health.

Most innovative financing has originated with governments—such as UNITAID and the International Finance Facility for Immunization—and private sector efforts such as Project RED, which engages in “cause marketing.”

But NGOs can also play a role. In fact, they have already been doing this through social entrepreneurs like Muhammad Yunnus (Grameen Bank), Bill Drayton (Ashoka), and Jacqueline Novogratz (Acumen Fund).

Top Ten Global Development Communications Stories of 2011

The first ladies of Kenya and South Africa tweeting for the first time at the Social Good Summit in New York.

This was originally posted to the Impatient Optimists, the blog of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, on Dec. 21, 2011.

 

As was the case in 2010, global development non-profits continued their love affair with social media, finding Twitter, Facebook and the like amazing tools for communicating and advocating on a wide range of global issues. From global health to climate change to political systems, we’ve seen health improved, lives saved, policies changed, and governments overturned when we harness these new information pathways effectively.

Based on the 11,196 non-profit professionals surveyed in the 3^rd Annual Non-Profit Social Network Benchmark Report,  the Facebook average member community size increased 161 percent in 2011, and the average Twitter base was up 2 percent. International groups reported the highest use of Facebook up by a whopping 97 percent, and nearly double the number of Twitter followers as compared to all non-profits. As a global health and development communicator, I’ve been tracking the incredible progression of how health and development organizations use both new and traditional media to connect, engage, and inspire.

It’s why I’ve created my very own Top 10 list of favorite global development communication picks of 2011. Now, on to my other subjective picks for 2011 (and, yes, the Gates Foundation is on the list!) in no particular order:

Bringing the Avon Lady Philosophy to Rural Ghana

One of the HealthKeepers sales ladies heading out on her rounds.

In many rural areas of Ghana, a ringing bell is the traditional way that itinerant sales agents announce their arrival in a village. More and more, those bells are announcing the arrival of the entrepreneurial women from the HealthKeepers Network who are promoting health while also making a living, with the motto “prevention is better than cure.” And they are forging a new way of using the private sector to deliver health and hygiene to rural areas often overlooked by traditional global health programs.

Daniel Mensah, head of HealthKeepers

Although different private sector strategies have been tried to promote contraceptive use in Ghana (where the 2008 Demographic and Health Survey  indicated a contraceptive prevalence rate for modern methods was 16.6%), the impact of these strategies has been limited due to the long distances to be traveled to reach relatively small numbers of people with limited purchasing power.

In October 2009, I visited HealthKeepers with two colleagues and Executive Director Daniel Mensah in a village about an hour outside of Accra. We were the first visitors just after HealthKeepers had been registered to continue the work begun by Freedom from Hunger. I immediately thought of Avon, a U.S. company I remember from my youth, and its Avon ladies who have sold cosmetics door-to-door since the 1930s. The HealthKeeper difference is that these sales ladies travel by foot, with their products in a basket perched on the top of their heads.

The merchandise includes a mix of health products — such as contraceptives, insecticide-treated mosquito nets, oral rehydration salts and home water treatment tablets —and other carefully selected personal care products which help ensure that the ladies turn enough of a profit to keep them motivated. In 2009, they were also selling low-cost eyeglasses; they gave one of my colleagues an impromptu eye exam under the mango tree.

Crisis in Horn of Africa is not over; how can we prevent another one in future?

This article was originally published in The Huffington Post on Oct. 4, 2011.
 
The last time the Horn of Africa was hit by a famine as severe as the current one, it was 1985 and I was just finishing two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa. My wife and I, moved by the horrific images coming out of Ethiopia, volunteered to work at a feeding camp with World Vision. But the U.S. relief organization was besieged with similar offers, and politely turned us down. Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones convinced a plethora of pop stars to record "We Are the World." That humanitarian disaster somehow became firmly entrenched in the hearts and minds of people around the world.

The current drought and famine is worse than the one in 1985 -- some say it is the worst in 60 years and affects more than 12 million people, most of them women and children -- but seems to be attracting a fraction of the world's attention, despite the proliferation of social media and social networks.

By some estimates, 300,000 children are suffering from severe acute malnutrition and are likely to die at a very high rate and very quickly, according to Executive Director Lisa Meadowcroft of AMREF USA, the U.S. affiliate of the African Medical and Relief Foundation (AMREF) based in Nairobi, who just came back from a trip to the Horn of Africa.

Cancer Rises in Africa, A Continent Ill-Prepared to Handle It

This article originally appeared in The Huffington Post on Sept. 20, 2011.

"Thank God I have AIDS and not cancer, because that would be a death sentence," an HIV-positive woman told Ann Kim, a freelance journalist on a fellowship from the International Reporting Project, in a clinic in Botswana earlier this year.

Botswana, a well-off country by African standards, has an adult HIV prevalence of 24 percent, the second highest in the world, and a health system well-prepared for dealing with it, but not cancer.

In Togo, Dr. Kokou Agoudavi, the head of non-communicable diseases at the Ministry of Health, told me that Togolese cancer patients sometimes sell their houses or fields to pay for cancer treatment, which is not available in-country. They have to go to neighboring Ghana, if they can afford it. He said this often happens in the late stages of cancer, when survival rates are low.