How Can Mobile Data Give Us a More Accurate Understanding of Global Health Outcomes?

In global health we're always talking about how do we make ourselves more accountable, how do we hold governments accountable for the financial expenditures they put into global health. At the root of the word accountability we're talking about counting, to this day when we talk about maternal health maternal mortality we talk about near natal mortality.

There are majority of countries where the burden of mortality is the greatest we're still estimating the burden of maternal mortality as opposed to actual head counts of how many mothers are dying in pregnancy. We throw around statistics like one woman dies in child birth or pregnancy every minute but that falls far short of the ideal that we would want to know the denominator of women of reproductive age, the denominator of women who're actually pregnant within a particular population.

And then knowing specifically how many pregnancies we're loosing and how many women our young mothers we're losing in those critical periods of time around child birth. So what these cellphones allow us to do now is really deploy and realize the basic enumeration systems that have to be in place for our public health system to function, and I think that's the root, the foundational accomplishment that was now within our grasp with some of these M-Health technologies.