A digital communication project that empowers previously disadvantaged women to create their own maternal health educational content, then share it among each other, has won a UCT academic and her international peers the prestigious National Academies Keck Futures Initiative (NAKFI) Challenge grant.
The researchers came up with the idea of empowering mothers in low-literacy and low-income communities to share health-care information through a locally available digital channel, which they named Digital Street Theatre (DST).
Senior lecturer and Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ICT4D) staff member Melissa Densmore and three other researchers will be using these funds to address maternal and child health issues through the project.
For the past few years, much of Densmore’s work has focused on providing computer-based support for health care and development in previously disadvantaged communities around Cape Town.
After her Master’s degree, she wanted to use her computing skills to help people and address issues of global poverty, malnutrition, health and other social problems.
“I was working in the start-up environment back in the United States and just didn’t find it really fulfilling to work on projects that were helping people who already have money to make even more money,” she said.
Densmore found herself networking with academics and researchers from across the globe who shared her passion for using computer science to improve lives.
Eventually, she joined forces with Kentaro Toyama and Mustafa Naseem from the University of Michigan School of Information, as well as Agha Ali Raza from the Information Technology University in Lahore, Pakistan, to work on a project to address the rising rates of maternal and child death around the world.
They recognised the fact that causes differ by country, but that the health knowledge and habits of mothers play a key role in reducing mortality.
Mortality rates also tend to be highest among low-literacy families, those that most need health education are least equipped to absorb it from mainstream sources.
Densmore said the DST project was based on the idea that “people have, historically, always communicated through stories so, when you see a story coming from one of your peers, it’s much more convincing than, say, a story coming from a government official or a textbook”.
Her group entered their proposal into the NAKFI Challenge. It was one of 78 applications from around the world. DST was chosen as one of the three winning projects.
Densmore will be kicking off her DST research in Ocean View, a community on the outskirts of Kommetjie in Cape Town, where another recent ICT4D project could offer a good basis from which to start.
Residents will be able to share their music, videos, news and learning materials for free within the community. They’ll also be able to connect with each other through a chat service like WhatsApp.