The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu,
recently called for a UK “mobile phone fast” on Christmas Day so that families could reconnect and bond. My kids are glued to their phones much of the
time and I have been known to sneak a few looks at my email on the 25th, so I
can definitely relate. But many people
around the world do not have the luxury of laying down their phones, because
their mobiles are essential to their livelihoods and to their
health.
Consider the following: fishing
communities rely on weather data from mobile phones to help them work out
the best times to take their boats out; farmer clubs
using text messaging to help farmers to share information about growing
conditions; market
traders who use apps to tell them which locations are offering the best
prices for different commodities; medical staff who use cameras on mobile
phones to remote diagnose
and prescribe treatment; HIV positive individuals who are reminded to adhere to
their antiretroviral
regimes; and communities that can the world know if government services
fail to reach them. These mechanisms, if
effective, are probably helpful to accelerating development and the reduction
of hunger and malnutrition.
But, with a few
exceptions, there are far too few mobile services designed to focus exclusively
on just that: the reduction of malnutrition.
Why should such services exist? Malnutrition in all its forms—children who can't realise their rights and develop to their full potential, women with not enough iron in their
blood carry their children, adults who are at risk of diabetes, hypertension,
strokes and heart disease due to obesity—affects 1 in 3 people world-wide. The consequences of malnutrition are
devastating. 45% of all under 3
mortality is related to malnutrition and the economic losses are
enormous—trapping people, families and communities in poverty and acting as a
drag on sustainable development.
And the returns to the scaling up of high impact interventions are astonishing. The Global Nutrition Report has shown that the median benefit-cost ratio of expanding programme coverage is 16 to 1. In other words for every dollar, birr, rupee or peso invested in scaling up high impact nutrition interventions, 16 will flow back to individuals, communities and nations from improved schooling and labour force outcomes.
And the returns to the scaling up of high impact interventions are astonishing. The Global Nutrition Report has shown that the median benefit-cost ratio of expanding programme coverage is 16 to 1. In other words for every dollar, birr, rupee or peso invested in scaling up high impact nutrition interventions, 16 will flow back to individuals, communities and nations from improved schooling and labour force outcomes.
Despite these impressive returns, the
scaling up of programmes is challenging.
Lack of finance and human capacity are familiar barriers. Frontline health workers have heavy case
loads and are burdened with paperwork.
Finance to develop messaging around preferred nutrition practices and to
provide appropriate technology to record, aggregate and analyse nutrition
measurements quickly and efficiently is hard to find from public sources.
Can mobile operators help? Mobile networks are re run for profit. But they do offer a broad potential platform
for the delivery of government approved nutrition messaging. Can they be geared to reminding pregnant
women about receiving antenatal care, to change the attitudes of mothers of
newborns about the need to breastfeed within an hour of birth, and exclusively
for 6 months thereafter? Can they be designed to help mothers wean their
children onto the right semi-solid foods at 6 months of age? Can they help children
understand what a balanced diet looks like?
Can they persuade and help adults to consume diets that are lower in
sugar, salt and saturated fats? We
simply don’t know.
The nutrition community has been slow to
experiment with (and then evaluate) mobile technology. Similarly mobile
operators have been slow to recognize the potential for attracting customers to
their services through offering nutrition information, free or even at a price. Let’s be clear: mobiles are not a panacea. There
are important and significant challenges to their effective use for nutrition. For
example, will mothers be able to read the information sent? Will they trust nutrition information via
mobile services and will the quality be sufficiently good? Will the information be acted on? And will
mobile operators be able to find a sustainable business model?
But the potential is great: mobiles offer a
way to personalize information, to allow customers to engage with information
services rather than simply be passive receivers of messages, to scale
geographically and to generate knowledge spillovers for those who do not have
direct access to phones.
As the 2015 Global Nutrition Report
suggests, the mobile network industry offers the potential to scale up
nutrition interventions that are reliant on behavior change. These two communities – public nutrition
professionals and private mobile operators-- need to begin innovating, piloting
and evaluating their joint efforts to accelerate the reduction of
malnutrition.
Can we really “Dial N for Nutrition”? Let’s at least try, and turn the conversation
to the avoidance of enforced fasting of food, care and health services rather
than the promotion of voluntary phone fasting.
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