About

We are a group of University of California, Berkeley students committed to increasing the access to emergency health care for underprivileged populations through the use of mobile technology.

Last July, we piloted with 8 villages in Rajasthan, India and established an SMS help line, called SMS Madad. Madad has an Arabic origin, and means “help” in Hindi. When someone in the village is hurt — cut, burn, animal bite, accident — they can immediately contact our designated Village Correspondent, or VC (the village resident with the cell phone), and he or she will send an SMS to a doctor, who will respond with advice in minutes.

This reduces the amount of time villagers spend going from place to place looking for the right facility to treat their injury or illness. It furthermore gives them the knowledge how to properly recover. In turn, SMS allows doctors to be able to go on with their normal routine and still quickly offer advice when there is a villager in need.

We are returning to Rajasthan this December to start our full implementation stage with the Raven Foundation. In 2010, we will service 50 villages — 50,000 people — to a doctor for emergency situations. These villagers currently do not have easy access to free emergency medical care, and we believe this project can save thousands of lives over the course of the next few years.

For more detail on our program, we encourage you to see the Mobilizing Health Summary page.

Please support our cause! Donate directly online (tax-deductible) or contact Pooja Upadhyaya of Mobilizing Health through email or phone: poojau@berkeley.edu | 949.350.1716

$25 will provide 10 villages with first aid kits
$50 will provide 15 villages with SMS units to contact the hospital for 1 year
$1,000 will help us purchase 1 team member’s one-way flight for December

Thank you!

-Mobilizing Health Team-