Africa/Public Health Case Ideas andLinks

See child mortality progress in this animation. Contrast between Bangladesh and neighboring Pakistan is shown, plus notice child mortality rates stay high in African countries. Microfinance affirmative could address child mortality in African countries as it has in Bangladesh.

Brief video provides overview of microfinance in Bangladesh (video starts automatically on Izzit.org site)

Online paper with overview of microfinance in Africa.

2. Malaria Free Villages

Public health project to provide individual villages tools to significantly reduce malaria. The Free Africa Foundation is directed by Ghanian economist George Ayittey, author of Africa Unchained. Click on Malaria Free Zones Project from home page.

3. Train THPs as public health workers in Africa, rather than pouring more money into regulated M.D. monopolies...


Overheads for case idea (online lecture soon and paper on topic soon...) See the WSJ article Videos Teach China's Rural Doctors (July 10, 2007, p. B1) (Here on Yahoo Finance.) Similar inexpensive video training could improve medical and public health training of rural Traditional Health Practitioners in Sub-Saharan Africa. Haoyisheng.com "has outfitted 6,000 classrooms in eight [Chinese] provences." Apparently some 120,000 rural Chinese "doctors" have attended. The article mentions a similar effort to train nurses in KwaZulu-Natal run by the Centre for Rural Health. Without live teachers there are, of course, problems and training is "stilted and difficult."

4. Public health aid for searchers, not planners

Drawing on William Easterly's analysis in White Man's Burden, this case shifts funding to public health entrepreneurs through market incentives. Foreign aid given to governments of Sub-Saharan African countries for economic development is reduced since most such projects are riddled with corruption (among both U.S. and African consultants and governments).

5. Public health aid for the safest, cheapest, most effective but politically incorrect pesticide

Malaria is a major public health problem in Sub-Saharan Africa, infecting millions each year. Twice yearly spraying of DDT inside homes dramatically reduces infection rates. Past overuse of DDT in the United States, partily subsidized by overeager public health officials here, led to fear that animal and especially bird populations would be severely impacted. But when DDT use was restricted in Africa and other impoverished areas, malaria infection and death rates rose rapidly. Careful application of DDTis safe for people and does not harm bird and animal populations. Many sources on this. See Africans Fighting Malaria, but research many scholarly studies documenting the DDT and malaria connection. See also links and note in Malaria/DDT section on Africa page.

6. Cell Phones for Public Health

Cell phones are revolutionizing small business enterprises across Sub-Saharan Africa. For decades African governments monopolized phone service and even in cities only the wealthy and politically-connected had access to phone service. Most Africa governments allowed private firms to build cellular networks and private capital has been flowing into Africa to build out these systems. Now tens of millions living in shanty-towns around major African cities, and the hundreds of millions more living in rural communities have access to cell phone service.

This is a major advance for private enterprise in Africa. Entrepreneurs can now call to find where to deliver goods and services, from fish, tomatoes, and wheat, to educational, medical, and financial services. Much of economics turns on coordinating the production and consumption decisions of millions of people who know little of what others have done or will do. Prices can coordinate economic activity (unless they are repressed by legislation, as now in Zimbabwe). But if twenty tomato sellers by accident bring their wares to the same village, prices collapse, tomatoes rot, they lose money, and nearby villages go without. Cell phones allow vendors to call around to see where the demand for their goods is highest. (And, it turns out that tomatoes have major public health benefits... See this Harvard School of Public Health survey article.)

Cell phones equally enable doctors to call from village to village to see where their services are most in demand, and allow the sick and wounded to call doctors directly for advice or services. As cellular service costs fall, teachers and students in poor communities and rural areas will also be able to call for information and advice.

Finally, cell phones can assist training for medical and public health services. In China a private firm is providing medical training to rural doctors by video (article here, and case #3 above). It is not an idea system, but traveling medical instruction is considered too expensive for the company, which now has 6,000 classrooms and 120,000 involved. Cell phones offer an way to enhance similar medical public health training services in Africa, with live training, answers to questions, and perhaps even diagnostic services. See this CDC article Public Health Meets Mobile Technology (full Winter, 2007 Yale Journal of Public Health article available for download).