Companies and organizations including Amazon and Paul G. Allen’s Vulcan Inc. are sending thousands of smartphones to West Africa, as reported in Fast Company. The devices could replace paper patient intake forms and speed the communication of crisis updates. But critics contend the devices may cause more harm than good.
Christopher Fabian, co-lead at UNICEF’s Innovation Unit, has posted 10 questions that should be addressed before distributing hardware, including, “Do you really need to distribute these devices?” He suggests people who do work with local technologists to develop prototypes of how the devices will be used and to test them locally.
Other questions center on loss, damage, charging, training, and connectivity and its costs. Infrastructure is limited and often overloaded; it may be unable to handle smartphone data.
In addition, he asks, how does hardware distribution affect the local economy and local businesses who sell feature phones? And finally, he asks, “How do you make sure you don’t create false incentives for the future?”
He emphasizes, “Increasingly, people like health workers, teachers, and other frontline professional can get access to a phone that is pretty OK. They may not have data—because the networks are thin. But the problem is not lack of devices. It is lack of information.”
He concludes, “The Ebola outbreak has brought out a tremendous amount of good sentiment and good-will in the technology community. It is vital that we channel that energy into things that will create strong and resilient structures over time, and that we work with local technologists and entrepreneurs in the countries affected by Ebola to ensure that we are helping them rather than simply doing what we think might be best from far away.”
Proponents of distribution say they have done the groundwork. The founders of Journey, an app company, reached out to aid organizations in Sierra Leone and Liberia about whether workers would want to use smartphones and got a positive response, Fast Company reports. Consequently, Journey created an app called EbolaCare for healthcare workers.
Fast Company quotes Britt Lake, director of programs at GlobalGiving, a charity crowdfunding platform that partners with dozens of small aid organizations in West Africa, as saying, “In general, philosophically speaking, I agree that flooding a market with something that’s not needed is not the right way to go, and that’s definitely why we were happy to work with Journey on something that was appropriate in partnership with health workers on the ground.”
In Politico, Arthur Allen writes, “In a way, the conflict is just the latest chapter in a debate raging since the 1960s about whether technological fixes—anything from vaccination campaigns to hybrid crops and fertilizer—are the best way to assist developing countries.”
He quotes White House chief information officer Steve VanRoekel, who is supporting the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Ebola-fighting effort, as saying, “The introduction of cellphones is a fantastic idea, but it has to be done in a careful way. You have to think carefully about what software you bring.”
