Women in Nepal are 25 times more likely to die due to pregnancy, or a pregnancy-related complication, than in the United States. In an effort to change this, USAID’s Health for Life project works alongside the Nepal Government to improve the country’s maternal and child health services. This article follows Prakriti Magar, a community action recorder, who works to improve the health of women and newborns in a remote area of Nepal, where the nearest doctor could be hours away.
Six days a week, Prakriti walks from her home in the town Sulichaur for three hours to meet with expectant mothers living in the village Mijhing. Using a smartphone application developed by USAID, Prakriti tracks their progress throughout pregnancy, reminds them to attend regular checkups, and encourages them to deliver at a health facility.”
Read more on usaidpubs.exposure.co
Every two years the World Health Organization (WHO) releases a list of medications it believes every person in the world should have access to, regardless of price. This helps individual countries decide what medicines they should prioritize, which is often a difficult and controversial subject. This year’s report included the most significant revision to the antibiotics section in the EML’s 40-year history. Read about the changes here.
The new WHO list should help health system planners and prescribers ensure people who need antibiotics have access to them, and ensure they get the right one, so that the problem of resistance doesn’t get worse.”
Read more on who.int
11 COST-EFFECTIVE USES OF DRONES IN ICT FOR AGRICULTURE
Catholic Relief Services (CRS) recently started using drones in agriculture projects. After seeing success, they decided to share their findings with other organizations considering this technology for agriculture. This article explores 11 ways that CRS found the use of drones to be beneficial, including their ability to lower analysis costs, produce more accurate maps, track changes over time, and make better-informed decisions.
We’ve been tracking UAV use in CRS for some time now, and we have two projects where we used them for emergencies, but this is the first case where a project requested their use for agriculture. We documented our experience on AgriLinks and wanted to share more technical data here.”
Read more on ictworks.org
Curious about what other technologies are useful for agriculture projects? CommCare has been used in multiple projects to support cooperative, extension programs, finance, and logistics in agriculture. You can find more information on CommCare for agriculture here.
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