Filed under: Education
Community Malaria Workers Use SMS to Report in Real-Time
- Malaria Consortium’s Ngor Pengby demonstrating how to charge a mobile phone using a solar panel. This project is in collaboration with Mobitel. Photo by WHO/Moeun Chhean Nariddh
From her house in Snay Anchit Village, about five kilometers from the health center in Kampot provonce’s Chum Kiri district, 20-year-old village malaria worker Kong Lida can clearly hear the noise of a generator roaring in the distance. This generator is an important source of power where Lida and other villagers have their car batteries charged everyday so that their houses can be lit up at night from electric lamps and at the same time charge up their mobile phones.
But soon Lida and other village malaria workers in her village and other communes will not need to pay the generator owner to have their car batteries charged anymore. Now, all these VMWs will get their power from a ubiquitous source of energy – namely solar power.
As part of the country’s malaria elimination strategy, the National Center for Parasitology, Entomology and Malaria Control or CNM, with technical support from Malaria Consortium (MC) and WHO, has launched a pilot program to train VMWs in Kampot, Siem Reap and Kampong Cham provinces on how to send simple mobile phone text messages (SMS) to report in real time on detected malaria cases. These SMS messages also support the paper reporting that feeds into the health information system from the health centers. (more…)
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Media Ban on TV, Radio Stifles Education
by Moeun Chhean Nariddh
The banning of radio and TV stations from reading newspaper stories on air not only infringes upon the independence and freedom of the media, but it also hurts the government’s poverty reduction brainchild.
As we all agree, one of the main factors that have plunged Cambodians into generations of poverty is ignorance and a lack education.
Due to the more than two-decade-long upheaval in the country, most people had missed their opportunity to go to school or had only little education. (more…)
