HealthLiberia.org – A Project of the AllAfrica Foundation

Imagine being a health educator in Bong County and being able to quickly find the latest study on preventing the spread of HIV among young people or the efficacy of bednets. Or being a local NGO in Buchanan and being able to share your report on women’s reproductive health and discuss its implications with other women’s health professionals. Or being the only doctor removing cataracts in the Ganta region and having a stream of visiting ophthalmic surgeons to help you restore sight to the blind. Or being the deputy health minister for planning and being able to see, at a glance, which organizations and agencies are doing what in any area of Liberia.

ollowing discussions with a wide range of government and health officials, non- governmental organizations, health advocates and donors, the AllAfrica FFFoundation has headquartered in Monrovia an ambitious African health initiative that is being prototyped in Liberia. The project is designed to tap AllAfrica’s core competencies to help address four urgent needs of the Liberian health sector, both government and civil society: easy access to up-to-date information; a facility for matching acute needs with volunteers; a method for tracking projects and funding; and a real-time online communications facility with archive and search capability. While each of these needs is vast, progress towards meeting them can be made through an integrated web interface, where each element strengthens the whole. The approach marries advanced information aggregation and dissemination capacity with simple, easy-to-use search and access, plus interactive tools for users. The project will: • Compile and maintain the most comprehensive public database of locally-relevant health information – sorted, tagged, indexed and searchable – from hundreds of sources, available online and through hand-held devices • Install pioneering, real-time communications modules that allow online discussions among multiple participants, while offering storage, indexing and search of past conversations, plus the ability to share documents and images • Offer a facility to match acute health-sector needs with qualified volunteers, from the Diaspora and beyond. • Provide a collaborative, constantly updating technology application to map and track health funding and projects, encompassing all donors and recipients and encouraging transparency and accountability. Creative intervention at these four points can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of policy planning and implementation by Liberian government departments and agencies, as well as by bilateral and multi-lateral donors. At the same time, these tools will inform NGOs and assist civil society in holding governments and international organizations accountable. HealthLiberia responds to expressed needs from all parties, but is particularly designed to aid the Liberian administration in planning and implementing health programs and stretching scarce resources. AllAfrica is uniquely positioned to provide tools to help address these needs through an integrated, user-friendly online initiative. The work is underpinned and made possible by a ground-breaking, open-source technology platform and development methodology that allow large, sophisticated web applications to be built quickly, maintained efficiently and extended organically. The health content database will utilize the sophisticated data-collection and information-organization toolset developed by the technology team of AllAfrica Global Media. It is being used by national and international organizations and companies, as well as by the prize-winning website allAfrica.com – the largest public source of news and information about Africa – which posts over 1300 articles a day, hosts a growing two-million document archive, receives more than two million monthly visits; serves more than five million monthly page views; and distributes further through such services as LexisNexis, Factiva (Reuters and Dow Jones), Bloomberg and Financial Times Information, which collectively reach tens of millions of end users worldwide. The Gadgets multi-function communications tool enables dispersed personnel to work collaboratively in real time. A permissioning system permits separate, confidential discussions and online meetings, and the archival function allows any authorized person to access earlier conversations. Gadgets is used by international NGOs and corporations on four continents in both English and French, and connects AllAfrica’s editorial and technology staff in seven countries. It is extensible to other languages and supports on-going additions and modifications. Matching volunteers with needs will leverage the global reach of the AllAfrica community. It will be launched as a pilot program in cooperation with JFK Hospital in Monrovia and Ganta Hospital in Nimba County, whose directors predict benefits from even short-term visits by a range of skilled volunteers, including health professionals, grant writers, accountants, and information and library specialists. US Doctors for Africa, with 3000 member physicians, will vet credentials of health-sector volunteers. Initially the project will support the scale-up of activities by two existing networks: HEARTT (Health Education and Relief Through Teaching), which is taking groups to work at JFK Hospital, and United Methodist congregations, which support Ganta. Because utility of the funding and project tracker depends on its design, it will couple powerful web applications with user-friendly online publishing tools, combining complex data sorting and streamlined data entry. Liberia has attracted hundreds of health interventions from large and small donors, whose work is neither well- documented nor coordinated. Efforts to track and harmonize are underway by several parties, including the Liberian ministry of health. But there is currently no way to combine all those efforts and – once the tally is “completed”– to keep it current. This initiative provides every funder and every project with simple, time-efficient ways to upload data that will be tagged, sorted, indexed and archived, as well as mapped and geo-tagged by location – and it begins to build the peer pressure to compel participation through public scrutiny. At its essence, this is a technology-enabled project that confers capacity on local efforts to address the health crisis. It will be responsive to the work already being done, facilitate its expansion and provide tools to adapt the processes to changing and emerging needs.