Weekly News Roundup
News, Events and Observations about Health Markets in the Developing World
Program News
The Gates Foundation blog Impatient Optimists recently wrote about DKT Indonesia, which uses social marketing to improve family planning and reproductive health in Indonesia. DKT’s approach has seen great success; DKT’s social marketing of reproductive health products has reached “more than 6.6 million Indonesian couples annually, making it the largest private family planning program in the world.” Read more here.
Riders for Health (RIH) recently teamed up with Partners in Health (PIH) to “help strengthen health care coverage in the Neno District of Malawi.” RIH will “manage a portion of PIH’s vehicles”, allowing PIH to focus its resources on supporting the region’s two major hospitals and 11 health centers. Read more about the partnership here.
Jaipur Foot, the Indian non-profit that makes high-quality low-cost prosthetic devices for the poor, was profiled this week in the LA Times. Congratulations to Jaipur Foot on the great coverage!
ColaLife has created a prototype of a new kind of cola bottle crate that has space for “AidPods” to fit in to unused space in the crate, allowing medicines to be transported along with the well-distributed bottles of sugary drink. What a neat idea! Click here to watch a video of the new prototype.
General News
UNAIDS Deputy Executive Director recently warned that budget cuts and donor fatigue could mean it will take another 50 years to stop the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Read more here.
Forbes’ online series The Future of mHealth recently wrote about the ability of mobile technology to give patients more control over their health and medical care. Though much of the article discusses aspects of mHealth that are not currently being applied in developing countries, there is certainly cross-over potential. Read the article here.
Earlier this week, The Economic Times published an article that looked at the challenges of providing healthcare in rural India. While many people focus on providing low-cost healthcare in this region, the article asserts that “Rural India is in fact not looking for "affordable" healthcare; it is looking for "high-quality" healthcare provided in a cost efficient manner.”
Despite the buzz and excitement about SMS mHealth programs, few have been evaluated to determine their effectiveness. Read more about this issue in this study by the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute.
Why do some startups succeed and others fail? A recent Harvard Business School working paper looks to answer this question. Read some of the key take-aways from the working paper in this Business Insider article.
Credit Suisse recently published a paper on how social entrepreneurship is re-defining the meaning of “return” in respect to business ventures.