Mobilizing Health Pilot Has Begun!

July 7, 2009

In our last post, we introduced our project, Mobilizing Health, before we left for our fieldwork in India. Mobilizing Health has received some funding from the Greater Good Science Center in the form of a summer fellowship to one of our members, Pooja Upadhyaya.

Now we have been here for three weeks and our pilot is under way! We have named it SMS Madad, which means SMS Help.

When we first arrived in Udaipur, our idea was shut down by the very woman who brought us to India. Things seemed a bit rocky, but she gave us the challenge to prove to her that our project was really needed. So for a week, we visited a few villages and interviewed their residents.

The response was very positive. Here is a small clip of what a village leader said about our project:

He is now one of our four pilot VCs (Village Correspondents) — villagers who have the cell phone and will contact the doctor in an emergency.

Since SMS Madad's official start on Monday, we have received a few text messages–pain, fever, ulcers–and doctors have responded. Surprisingly, the doctors here do not know how to type, so we have been training them.

To see more of what we have been up to, we have been uploading video blogs onto our site every few days. Visit our News tab at mobilizinghealht.wordpress.com to view them.

Also, please click here to take a look at some of our project pictures and follow us on Twitter @mobilizinghlth

Thank you

-Mobilizing Health-