Credit: James Hill for the New York Times
From March 9th, 2010 New York Times article by Jeffrey Gettleman: “Shower of Aid Brings Flood of Progress“.
His (Jeffrey Sachs) intent was to show that tightly focused, technology-based and relatively straightforward programs on a number of fronts simultaneously — health care, education, job training — could rapidly lift people out of poverty.
In Sauri, at least, it seems to be working. Some of the goals were literally low-hanging fruit, like teaching banana farmers to rotate their crops. Other programs were more sophisticated, like the battle against malaria, which employs cutting-edge mobile technology against a disease that kills more than one million children each year.
The other day, a community health team in Sauri stooped through the doorway of a home of several sick children, said hello to Grandma and got to work. Within minutes, a health worker had pricked a child, sent a text message with the blood results by cellphone to a computer server overseen by a man named Dixon in a town about an hour away and gotten back these instructions: “Child 81665 OKOTH Patrick m/16m has MALARIA. Please provide 1 tab of Coartem (Act) twice a day for three days.”
These small miracles are happening every day now in Sauri, population 65,000.
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