Soyapi Mumba easily explains the dual technology environments in Africa – he says that he follows Silicon Valley news, reads tech blogs and listens to podcasts on his phone. When the phone is put away, however, the sub-Saharan African landscape is totally different. Power, computers, and internet are all present but not readily available and service is not reliable. Mumba joined Baobab Health in 2006 as an engineer working to address healthcare issues in Malawi. His TED Talk Medical tech designed to meet Africa’s needs outlines some of the innovations Soyapi and his team have made in Malawi.
Mumba says that one doctor in Africa might be responsible for 30,000 patients in total. Patients might not know a birthdate so programs are written to approximate dates. Patients who live in a village without an address need an approximate landmark in the system to be located geographically. Barcodes were used to give each patient a unique ID number and track their treatment and history. When Soyapi and his team couldn’t find a reliable network to transmit data they built a network to link the clinics in Malawi’s capital Lilongwe.
Soyapi Mumba is a passionate speaker and has a great catalog of work presenting projects he’s worked on to bring technical solutions to the African plains. My favorite paper is titled Using touchscreen medical record systems to support and monitor national scale-up of antiretroviral therapy in Malawi, published in the PLOS Medicine Journal in August, 2010. I always try to express to my students that engineering involves calculations and analysis but the application side often requires us to make the best use of the equipment available at the time. Mumba’s talk and his work is a great example of taking current resources and building viable systems.