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STORY: NEW YORK / RAPIDPRO EBOLA
TRT: 1.21
SOURCE: UNICEF
RESTRICTIONS: NONE
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH / NATS
DATELINE: 22 SEPTEMBER 2014, NEW YORK, USA
1. Various shots, exterior UNICEF House
2. Various shots, audience
3. SOUNDBITE (English) Anthony Lake, UNICEF Executive Director:
“We are developing now, something called mHero which I’m excited about, which is being developed for RapidPro, and we’re going to use for the Ebola response and it will allow us then to check on how the health centers are doing and check daily on the health of the community health workers.”
4. Various shots, panelists
5. SOUNDBITE (English) Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Minister of Finance, Federal Republic of Nigeria:
“Nigeria has done well, thank god, in containing the Ebola virus and today there is no case. We had 19 cases, 7 deaths. The rest recovered. How did it happen? Massive communication. We used mobile telephones to send out SMSs, the government did, to those 125 million lines. I have mine. I was trying to pull it up on my phone just to show you - so with that, we’re able to tell every household what it looks like, the symptoms, everybody who had a phone.”
6. Various shots, audience
UNICEF’s global innovation team today (22 Sept) launched RapidPro, an open-source app store for international development.
At the launch at UNICEF Headquarters in New York, Executive Director Anthony Lake said a new app called mHero was now being developed to be used in the Ebola response “and it will allow us then to check on how the health centers are doing and check daily on the health of the community health workers.”
Also speaking at the launch, the Minister of Finance of Nigeria, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, said her country “has done well” in containing the Ebola virus through “massive communication.”
UNICEF in Nigeria built the largest mobile health system in the world where every birth is reported in real-time through a simple text message.
Okonjo-Iweala said “we used mobile telephones to send out SMSs, the government did, to those 125 million lines. I have mine. I was trying to pull it up on my phone just to show you - so with that, we’re able to tell every household what it looks like, the symptoms, everybody who had a phone.”
RapidPro pulls together award-winning applications like U-report, Project Mwana and RapidFTR and more into one-easy-to-understand bundle –ready for governments, large organizations and others to deploy anywhere in the world.
RapidPro has been developed in collaboration with Nyaruka, a Rwandan software firm responsible for TextIt – an intuitive, visual interface for building mobile-based applications.
Any government or partner can download these basic apps, customize them for their own country, and just like with iTunes, there is a quality control system.
