Someone does something finally about something and all you hear are the usual 1) it not a priority 2) there are better ideas 3) this won't work. Now what stopping you from doing it.
This idea is laudable...at least for for the single fact...they are trying something. I
It is certainly laudable, in so far as "something is better than nothing"; but that seems to be about it.
It may work. CBA has trail blazed with Mshwari..and has within 2yrs overtaken all banks to have more than 10M bank accounts...and have loaned out billions..and recieved nearly 100B deposits from the poorest.
We had the same same arguments with M-pesa...
Nevertheless matters of health are different. There are serious ethical and legal issues in health that are both different and not easy to get around; in that regard, a reference to "same arguments" is entirely misplaced. (Moreover, the mere fact that something that was scoffed at, by some, ended up working does not necessarily imply that everything that is scoffed at will work; "proof by exception" generally does not work. Each "innovation" must be judged on its own merits.)
And there's another thing to keep in mind here: Whereas more technologically advanced places might not have tried something like MPESA---because there is little use for it---they certainly have been hard at work on telemedicine. So the notion of Kenya/South Africa blazing trails with this "forum" is simply off. What's more, there are important lessons to be learned from the others.
Poor folks in kenya are not stupid...they are very literate...and such ideas may stutter but they will work..because there is NO ALTERNATIVE.
The basic issues have little to do with "stupidity" or "literacy", and there is no need to inject irrelevant "emotion" into this. And it depends on what you mean "will work". Will it work as a "forum"? I don't see why it can't; it might even be useful in that way. Beyond that? One only has to look at the initial ideas in South Africa---diagnosis by phone, prescriptions by phone, etc.---and what
Hello Doctor in South Africa currently is.
To my mind, the matter here is quite straightforward, and I will put in thus:
(a) What are the basic health problems that most Kenyans (Africans) face?
(b) What are the prospects that this
Hello (Sema) Doctor will be able to address those?
In (a), we have, for example, diarrhea, which you mentioned. Another is malaria. Cholera is never too far away. And so on, and so forth. We know that there would be tremendous improvements in the health of Kenyans (Africans) just by having toilets and latrines, people pooping right and washing hands, having clean drinking water, etc. No type of fancy mobile-phone "app" will change that.
So, unless people will be using mobile phones to plug their butts when they have diarrhea, or using them to whack mosquitos, it's hard to see where this particular "high tech" thing is going in that regard. The basic problems of health in Africa will not be solved with such gimmicks. What is required is real hard and serious work, with attention paid to the fundamentals---and that
there is the ALTERNATIVE. To the extent that anyone claims otherwise, it behooves them to explain exactly how. And that can be done this way:
(a) A statement of the health problem.
(b) An explanation of how MPESA Telemedicine will help.