In Rwanda
I’ve been in Rwanda for a little over a week now. Its my first time here and so far I really do love this country. Its quite beautiful, much more lush and green than I had imagined. The people are quite friendly and always offer up a smile. I am here to start a new project that will involve using hand-helds to collect health data (more on this in a later post). To that end I’ve been working closely with the folks at the Twubakane project. Its great to be here and see some of these bigger projects working outside of the context of my comfortable office at home. There is a lot of great work going on here.
After meeting with the folks I will be working with at Twubakane, I was taken to the Ikigo health center in Kicukiro. Its a small facility that seems to be handling a great number of folks in a densely populated area. We had a surreal experience riding out to the center as we were bumping along the pothole-filled dirt road only to run into a film crew in the middle of a shoot - camera on rails, mic booms, the works. I’m still left confused by it. Nonetheless we met with some of the community health workers who go door to door in their villages to collect data. I learned that they are elected by their peers in the villages to do the job - there is a great deal of trust there. Twubakane should be praised for these kinda of approaches as it brings a sense of honor to these important tasks. We talked at length (with much translation) about what has worked and what has been difficult with the paper-based system we hope to replace or enhance. There are some very important steps in the paper system we’ve got to think on. The current system allows all of the workers and the program supervisors to review the data together as they compile it. This lets them figure out if changes in the numbers are due to a growing health problem, or mistakes in collection. If we have the data in our system doing the compilation for them we might skip this step and that would be bad for the communities. We must keep this in the program itself.
Meeting with the health workers was worth the trip for me on its on, but of course I’ve done more than that while here. We hope to be able to hire a local developer to join the team, but only have a couple days left to get that done. It is possible though. I’m excited about this project and being here in Rwanda has brought home to me the importance of certain aspects of our approach at IntraHealth. The use of open source hit me in the head as I was asked very pointedly about it (unprompted, I promise!) It seems the idea of having to fly someone in to work on a couple of extra proprietary systems has grown old. But more than that, the true ownership of these projects in terms of Stakeholder Leadership Groups, or the elected health workers, or hiring local talent seems to be the right approach for this kind of work.
