Happy holidays!

As we are leaving for a few days off for the holidays, we wish you all a Merry Christmas and a very happy New Year, filled with joy in your lives and success for your projects!

Meeting with the NGO ‘Women and Health Alliance International’ (WAHA)

We met with Dr. Sinan Khaddaj (Secretary General) and Cheikh Mbaye (Information Technology and Web Manager) in Paris on December 15th.

‘Women and Health Alliance International (WAHA) is an international non-profit, non-governmental organisation based in France that has been launched by Her Highness Sheikha Shamsa bint Hamdan Al-Nahyan, with the over-arching goal of addressing maternal and neonatal health in disadvantaged communities throughout the world.’

We shared a lot on their experience and their vision: new technologies are actually a great opportunity to improve health in poor areas. WAHA believes that they have to evaluate the people needs first, then see how to meet them and eventually use new technologies to accelerate and improve the solutions.

Here is a typical example of what has been achieved in Senegal together with the Fistula Fondation: they have brought ambulance to the villages within a 70 km radius of district hospital to allow the sick women to be taken care of as soon as possible.

WAHA also has projects in the field of telehealth (telediagnostic, electronic medical records) and in the implementation of new devices (e.g. they are currently looking for reliable and fast technologies to determine blood antigens when emergency transfusion is needed).

For all these reasons, WAHA and HTech4Dev will find opportunities to set up projects together in these areas. 

Feed-back on e-training projects

We received two projects aiming at developing e-training in Africa.

In Gabon, Dr. Akim Adegnika and his team in Lambaréné wanted to implement e-courses for students and medical staff. The major task of the project was to define the field and the content of the courses to then, enroll people to study online and eventually take secured tests.

As a part of the AMANET network, Dr. Aceme Nyika worked with Dr. Wen Kilama on ethics committees training about new technologies. This project addresses a capital issue not only in the developing world but also in emerging economies and even in some industrialized countries: how to evaluate, control and promote new technologies in the field of health.

These two projects do not rely on tech transfer this is why they cannot be funded through our initiative. However we believe that they are dealing with interesting topics and deserve support: we agreed to help them designing and setting up their courses.

Meeting with the European Space Agency (ESA)

 

We were introduced to ESA by Victor Demaria-Pesce, Head of Institutionnal Relations at Inserm (member of Aviesan). We had then the pleasure to meet representatives of the EU Relations Office of Paris. As we were describing our initiative they came up with very interesting remarks and comments on how space technologies can be involved for such projects for health and environment. 

As a matter of fact ESA already participates in different programmes described on their website.They have two main programmes in health:

• Integrated Application Promotion (IAP) such a SAHEL
• Tech Transfer Programme (TTP)

They could help us with their technology in many various projects:

• Meningitis: weather forecast by satellite to link meningitis epidemy to hygrometry and dry winds allowing real-time surveillance and population warning
• Diagnostic: data teletransmission and hygiene guidelines sharing
• Drug monitoring: software to secure and analyse data, extension to epidemiology
• Telemedicine: project SAHEL in Senegal

We do hope that we can build strong enough projects to meet their expectation and get their support! This could be a great step forward and good to insure the projects' sustainability.