Dudzai Mureyi
Once, in 2012, while taking a summer school course at the University of Ghana, a pan-Africanist said in a lecture, ’Show me a country today, that Ghana can go and colonise, and whose citizenry Ghana can use as a source of cheap labour for decades, with impunity.’ Let me hasten to add that his lecture was not about assigning blame to Africa’s former colonisers while absolving Africans of being complicit in Africa’s state of underdevelopment. He went to town about our shortcomings too.
With the above quote, his point, simply, was that, a number of the strategies that highly industrialised countries once used to advance and set themselves on a trajectory of continued economic success, such as slavery, colonisation, flagrantly protectionist economic policies, intellectual property infringements, blatant disregard for occupational health and safety considerations and unfettered extraction and combustion of non-renewable fuels, are now downright illegal under international law and labour regulations, or frowned upon in the wake of progressive and sustainable ways of working. They are therefore not quite as available to today’s less industrialised countries.
A new, digital way.
Lesser developed countries now have to pursue alternative socioeconomic success models, in order to leapfrog along the path of development. The leveraging of digital information and communication technology tools has been hailed as a way through which low income countries can begin to bridge the development chasm between themselves and high-income countries, efficiently. In theory, the revolutionising force that is digital ICT is a nice narrative to peddle. The romantic connotations of an ‘accelerated transformation’ story, is particularly an easy sell to audiences that are one way or another, invested in the affairs of underdeveloped countries. Such a narrative elicits the same warm sentiments that a typical rags-to-riches one does.
A cursory look at POTRAZ statistics, suggests that the ICT-powered leapfrogging sounds feasible for Zimbabwe. The mobile penetration in Zimbabwe for instance, is at 84 percent. Internet penetration, the thing that is to contemporary economies what coal was to the industrial revolution, is just shy of 50%.
I doubt there is a development sector for which the call for adopting digital IT has been louder than that we’ve heard for healthcare. When embraced and implemented effectively, the benefits of ICT tools in managing copious amounts of data and smoothening the speed of information transmission such as in the data-intensive and data-driven domain of healthcare, are generally observable. The World Health Organization has long called for the harnessing of ICT tools for any health-related activity (referred to as e-Health, for brevity). In Zimbabwe we have something resembling a fledgling national E-Health policy and recently we read about our government’s new Manicaland Telemedicine (the use of telecommunication equipment to facilitate delivery of a healthcare service to persons a distance away from the healthcare service provider) project. A review of the election manifestos of political parties that availed them in the run up to our just ended election, talked about their plans for applying digital ICTs in our health sector, to varying degrees. A significant number of private businesses are already engaged with e-health interventions – Tech companies are developing and retailing them as part of their core business and health insurance companies and health institutions are utilising them to streamline their processes and lower overheads and transaction costs. By these measures, Zimbabwe is awake to the possibilities although more can be done to systematically develop E-health into a real sector that holds its own on the Finance minister’s balance sheet.
In what will be a series, this August, I will write here about the business of E-health; the benefits for patients and healthcare providers, the opportunities for the Zimbabwe’s for-profit private sector to make serious money, the Zimbabwe-specific risks associated with ICT adoption for health and the respective roles of various arms of our government in further opening up the space for the profitable deployment of digital tools for healthcare delivery.
So, hold on to your hats!
Dudzai Mureyi is a pharmacist skilled in health policy analysis, currently pursuing doctoral studies in Global Health. Find her on Twitter: @BonnieDudzai or email her at: dudzai8787@gmail.com.
