Project Name: HealthPhone
Organisation: The Mother and Child Health and Education Trust
Location: Maharashtra
Project since: 2011
Project URL: http://motherchildtrust.org

Description:
Health Phone was launched by the Mother and Child Health and Education Trust, a not-for-profit initiative. It provides families with their own personal reference library and guide to better health practices. Available in real time, right to those who need it, when they need it and when a health problem is about to strike, where they are, and as they are.

HealthPhone uses communication processes to improve life chances for poor and vulnerable populations. It involves a mobile phone, with basic health information embedded on the phone; provide families in rural villages and slums with essential health information, in their hands, when they need it, in a language they understand and with visual information that works forthose with low literacy levels.

HealthPhone’s health and nutrition content is scripted on knowledge prepared jointly by UNICEF, WHO, UNESCO, UNFPA, UNDP, UNAIDS, WFP and The World Bank.

It addresses the main areas of concern; Timing Births, Safe Motherhood and New-born Health, Child Development and Early Learning, Breastfeeding, Nutrition and Growth, Immunization, Diarrhoea, Coughs Colds and More Serious Illnesses, Hygiene, Malaria, HIV, Child Protection, Injury Prevention, and Emergencies (preparedness and response).

This content are pre-loaded on popular low-cost models of mobile phones – no signal is required, nor cost and knowledge to download videos and other media. Users choose what they want to watch and when, wherever they happen to be.

Result: In Information dissemination among beneficiary group / front workers, 1800 mothers, 60 frontline workers and 5000 children in schools and 2000 young people through frontline workers have been covered. In training and capacity building of frontline workers 60 workers have been engaged. In monitoring and tracking of progress 5 frontline workers have been trained and engaged. The content have already translated into 215 languages, over 15 million copies are already in circulation.  Illiterate friendly video, audio and image files highlighting over 125 key health messages in English and 15 Indian languages have been issued as well.

Project Strength, Weakness, Improvisation & Scalability

• The project ‘HealthPhone’ is considered an innovation forward. It provides families with their own personal reference library and guide to better health practices. It has provision for preloaded content on low-cost mobile phones and on the Cloud! This project is implemented through the collaboration with Maharashtra Government through providing a chip or a micro SD card that is pre-loaded with information for Rs 200 only.
• The HealthPhone project is a scalable model and especially its audiovisual component is highly scalable. This model is horizontally replicable.
• However, there are areas that require improvement like recording of data. Also women intervention should be direct rather than mediated through frontline workers. There can be crowd sourcing. It can be customized for virtualization to make it portable on basic types of devices.
• The content should be made mandatory for providers. There is need for subtitling in audio- visual content.
• The challenge is it requires huge capital investment in order to provide for handsets and the chip. Sustainability and cost management is a challenge.