Make Noise for MDGs

The Millennium Campaign aims to build political will for the achievement of the MDGs primarily through raising public awareness and increasing pressure on governments. Through supporting national campaigns with advocacy, networking, mass mobilizations, training and capacity building, as well as media and communications development the Millennium Campaign works with citizens to monitor and hold their government's to account for their commitments made to achieving the MDGs.

McKibben saw the way ahead as harnessing the Internet’s multiplicative power. In 2007, with the help of six students and email’s exponential impact, 1,400 simultaneous demonstrations took place countrywide. “The thing just went viral,” McKibben exclaims, “…the biggest day of grass-roots environmental activism since the first Earth Day in 1970.” Social networking and cell phones proved most effective tools for mobilization.

From Martin Luther King, Jr., McKibben absorbed principles of righteous activism. The good fight must be “creative…determined…joyful.” In closing, McKibben cautions “nature does not grade on a curve.” Global warming “is the morally urgent question of our moment.”

From the start of our projects to the finish, it’s people who determine what FrontlineSMS:Medic does, when we do it, and why. The tech tools we use exist to serve patients, community health workers, and healthcare professionals – not the other way around. This mindset is critical for a number of reasons. I’ll explain. We strongly believe that projects should start when clinics ‘pull’ them to a site, as opposed to having projects ‘pushed’ onto healthcare providers. Ken Banks included the (very important) push/pull differentiation in his “Development best practices for beginners” series. Clinics are not just convenient places to pilot technology innovations. Healthcare providers should demand programs they need, and we should be ready to respond. Local staff should determine how the tech will be used, and we should be flexible and helpful in working through use cases and functionality.

During the past two decades, population growth, improvement in incomes and diversification of diets have steadily increased the demand for food. Prior to 2000, food prices were in decline, largely through record harvests. At the same time, however, public and private investment in agriculture, especially in the production of staple food, decreased, which led to stagnant or declining crop yields in most developing countries.1 Rapid urbanization has led to the conversion of farmland to non-agricultural uses, and low food prices have encouraged farmers to shift to alternative food and non-food crops. Long-term unstable land use has also caused land degradation, soil erosion, nutrient depletion, water scarcity and disruption of biological cycles.

How powerful is a light-weight tool in the right hands? During a six month pilot in Malawi, our partner doubled the number of people being treated for Tuberculosis.

Driven by local ownership and appropriate technology. In the developing world, lack of infrastructure prevents health workers from delivering efficient healthcare to rural areas. As health workers travel from clinics to reach isolated patients, they are often as disconnected from central clinics as the patients they are trying to serve. The mission of FrontlineSMS:Medic is to advance healthcare networks in the developing world by building and distributing innovative, appropriate mobile technologies. The centerpiece of our system is FrontlineSMS, a free, open-source software platform that enables large-scale, two-way text messaging using only a laptop, a GSM modem, and cell phones. We are also developing several applications for the FrontlineSMS platform that will enable better patient management, electronic medical records via the cell phone, cheap mobile diagnostics, and mapping of health services.