mHealth

Big congratulations to AshokaTECH's own Ben Lyon—regular Techonomics blogger and founder of FrontlineSMS:Credit!  Vodafone America recently announced its competition results in the following press release:

$650,000 awarded to three groundbreaking wireless projects selected for their potential to save lives and solve critical global challenges

In February, the Information Society Innovation Fund (ISIF), selected 8 projects from its ISIF 2010 program to which it would provide grant funding. ISIF is a "small grants program aimed at stimulating creative solutions to ICT development needed in the Asia Pacific Region." This year they recieved 207 submissions for their grants, from 25 different countries. The awardees are from Vietnam, Bhutan, Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, and Australia/Timor-Leste.The projects focus on health, IT infrastructure, multilingualism and general access to information.

Deadline Feb. 1, 2010

Apply for up to $650,000 for "Wireless Projects Demonstrating Promise Of Solving Critical Global Issues and mHealth." The Wireless Innovation Project identifies and rewards the most promising advances in wireless related technologies that can be used to solve critical problems around the globe. Although projects may be global in scope, applicants must be nonprofits, educational institutions or social entrepreneurs based in the United States. Up to $650,000 will be awarded to wireless projects demonstrating exceptional promise to solve a critical global issue in the following fields: education; health; access to communication; the environment; or economic development. Final winners will be announced on April 19, 2010 at the annual Global Philanthropy Forum in Redwood City, California.

Find complete detailed information about eligibility and an application here.

Trust me, beloved friends, when I say that the past few days have afforded me the opportunity to link, somewhat intricately, my impressions of the ongoing climate change summit in Copenhagen with my long-running musings about mHealth and the “cloud”.

I wished though that I could also say that this intricately forged link is a positive one. Alas, negativity seems to prevail.

The whole tortuous process began last month when I began preparations to participate in a series of workshops and seminars about the course of eHealth in Africa. As I read up on the travails of telemedicine in Southern Africa in the 1980s and pondered the fact that—all the highfalutin bromides notwithstanding—for most African practitioners and patients, what counts for telemedicine most of the time is the house officer (junior doctor) using his mobile phone to communicate between wards and to deliver dosage instructions to support staff because the official land line has long ago ceased to function, the climate change conference was building its crescendo. Then Bush House wrote.