November 1st MedAfrica will go live and it looks like a rather interesting venture. Many initiatives in the medical industry see light of day, but MedAfrica seems to stick out from the traditional set-ups – below I have provided some lines as to why they caught my attention.
Like with the iCow example, I blogged about two months ago, MedAfrica is a mobile service that in a cost efficient way provides basic information about health and medicine (to humans). Yes, I love this kind of model, but it also has a connotation of something we have heard about before. Though, please take these two specific key elements into perspective before you make your final call:
1) In Kenya each doctor serves +7,000 individuals in average (mission impossible!!) which is why a mobile service like this (accessible and self-serve information) can be instrumental in improving national health
2) MedAfrica will launch their platform to become a sustainable business rather than going the traditional path of being not-for-profit which is rather widespread in this industry. To me it is logic; the more MedAfrica earns (being reasonable and not greedy), the more people they can serve with constantly improved health/medicine information
You can sign up to MedAfrica’s newsletter as well as follow them on Twitter via their website… I will keep you posted when something interesting happens in their court.
P.S. It could be interesting to have MedAfrica on MYC4 somehow…. not sure exactly how, but lets see where it will lead from here.
