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Health: SMS for life in Tanzania

An innovative system using mobile phones has been set up in 135 rural villages in Tanzania, covering a population of about one million, to keep track of stocks of anti-malarial drugs. Each week the local health facilities are sent an automated SMS to check that their stocks of these drugs are not running too low. Staff can then reply via SMS toll-free to a data-base system hosted in the UK with requests for the medicines they need. The supplies of Artemisinin-based combination therapy drugs and quinine injectables are then traced and dispatched as needed.

In the first weeks of the system the stock-outs were reduced by about 75 per cent. The country’s health authorities are now interested in using the system in its 5,000 clinics and hospitals around the country, many of which can be dangerously low on stocks.

The new system has been developed by Novartis, IBM, Vodafone and Roll Back Malaria, which was launched by the World Health Organization in 1998.

About one million people in Africa die from malaria each year, 90 per cent of whom are pregnant women and children under five. Tanzania is the third largest population at risk and malaria is the leading cause of illness and death in the country. One of the contributing factors is the lack of available supplies of the necessary drugs. The new SMS for Life system is designed to make the drugs readily available whenever needed.

The Roll Back Malaria partnership aims to reduce worldwide deaths from malaria to almost zero in five years via its global malarial action plan.

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