Pilot Summary and Next Steps
Leave a CommentOur 7 weeks in India flew by very fast and it was quite a roller coaster! The Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) we went to India with, the Narayan Sewa Sansthan, turned out to be corrupt and possibly brought us over to their city thinking we were just wealthy American donors.
Once they realized that was not our intention (but that our intention was to actually implement the project we had communicated about for months), it was an uphill battle to pilot what we came to do. However, with the help of many wonderful people inside and outside the NGO, we were able to pull together the resources to connect 8 villages to around-the-clock doctors on duty.
Each village had a Village Contact (VC) who was the point person to go to whenever anyone in their village became ill or had an emergency. Since the communication is done through text messaging (SMS), we trained every VC on how to send SMS and what information is needed for a doctor to give an accurate diagnosis. In just 25 days, we were able to successfully connect 64 patients to a doctor’s advice. With this promising outcome we will be returning to India this December to implement with 50 villages and a fully operating ambulance. This time, we will be implementing with the new trustworthy NGO, The Raven Foundation.
Please take a look at our presentation that gives an overview of what we have done, including some real SMS sent/received, and our next steps: Mobilizing Health Presentation for Implementation
-MH Team-
*This post is also viewable at the Greater Good Blog
Our last week, days 41-46: 7.21.09 – 7.26.09
Unfortunately, we’ve got some dissapointing news–looks like we were working with a corrupt NGO and so on our very last day we had to pull our project. Luckily, we have some data showing that our idea really does help the villagers, it’s just that we need to work with people who are truthful and want to make the program their own.
There is a bright side — we found a new foundation that is very excited about our program, the Raven Foundation, and I am traveling back to Udaipur today to have a meeting with the founders.
Here is our vlog from our last week:
