MedAfrica, a mobile application developed by Shimba Technologies Ltd was launched yesterday. The Nokia store application was launched in partnership with Nokia, whose aim is to make healthcare information affordable and accessible in Kenya. Born out of the health category of Tuvitu which is a mobile content platform by Shimba Technologies also, MedAfrica has gone from winning a Pivot25 award to showcasing the app at Demo fall, Silicon Valley where they did so well, they were actually among the top 10 apps.
What does MedAfrica do?
MedAfrica’s objective is to improve community health by increasing access to healthcare information directly though the MedAfrica app. They will do this by creating platforms that facilitate dissemination of information and build communities around the different issues and conditions while at the same time converging all stake holders and amplifying their efforts. Steve Mutinda, the Founder and CEO said that this information will be provided by the government via Open Data, Private Sector, Academia and the general health practitioners.
Kenya has a population of 40million and 7,000 registered medical practitioners yet it enjoys mobile phone penetration of 26 million. This gives the viability of mobile phones to disseminate the health content in the country. This also applies to other African countries with infrastructural limitations.
Medafrica will be accessible via Java, Nokia phones and also Android. A mobile web version will also be available and USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) for the low end phones. The start-up is seeking out partnerships with government institutions, pharmaceutical companies, medical associations, medical support groups, non-governmental organizations, mobile network operators and general populations in order to amplify their contribution to health-care service delivery.
“Our mission is to Increase access to health related content and services to save lives and build a healthy population, our target being to reach every house hold in Africa. In this case we have a road map in place where we launch the product in Kenya then scale it to other African Countries” said Jackline Cheruiyot, MedAfrica Team Leader.
MedAfrica promise ease of access to a full spectrum of health info and content Services from the comfort of one’s mobile phone for the Millions of Africans.
Other applications by Shimba Technologies are CDFMonitor, KTraffic, RichMobile, and Sarova App.
