FonAid - Accessible Health Information for the Marginalized

The New Way of Making Health Information Accessible to Marginalized Populations. Simple as Radio. Versatile like an App.

More than 200 million people were affected by natural disasters or displaced by conflict and violence in 2014. 50 per cent of refugees are women and girls. When crises strike, gender inequalities worsen. Gender-based violence increases, women are excluded from life-saving services and their limited mobility leads to physical insecurity. Access to healthcare is also limited, increasing mortality and malnutrition rates, particularly for mothers and infants. As a result, 60 per cent of preventable maternal deaths take place in settings of conflict, displacement and natural disasters.

Mobile technology is revolutionizing the world by providing access to critical health knowledge and education. Yet marginalized populations often cannot use technology to its full potential, due to a lack of ownership, access and ability. Women are facing particular challenges to benefit from information technologies. There is a strong case for a simple, accessible and cheap technology that can provide free audiovisual content to marginalized populations. 

We combined the best of both worlds: the ease of use of radio with the versatility of smartphones.

Our approach is based on 3 key elements:

• structured and localized audiovisual content
• a mobile web application acting as an intuitive user interface
• a dedicated Wi-Fi hotspot which serves the web app

The core of FonAid is the FonAid Box:  a small plug-and-play device that can be used anywhere to share audiovisual content on any smartphone over WiFi.It exclusively serves the FonAid web application which acts as an accessible user interface for the contents on the FonAid Box. No fees. No hassle. On the spot.

URIDU (www.uridu.org) has created a huge base of localized audio contents for health education. Those contents are both available online (www.uridu.app) and offline using FonAid. The audio content contains more than 400 relevant questions and answers about health, nutrition, family planning, child care and more. This equals 12 hours of spoken text. All contents have been developed by experts and most of them have been used in humanitarian work for more than 30 years.

FonAid is powered through USB which offers a great flexibility in the field. It can be powered using a USB car charger, a USB power bank, solar power and more. Power comsumption is very low - just 1.5 W.

The device is lightweight (77g) and small: it is the size of a pack of cigarettes. The Wifi range is up to 200 meters. FonAid is robust - it has no movable parts and it relies on proven hardware that has been used million times before.

It is mostly a new application of existing technologies. The core of our project is the distribution of knowledge using audio contents (MP3) to illiterate rural women. Today we are doing this using solar-powered MP3 players, micro-SD cards, dedicated wifi hotspots (the fonaid box), Voice API and mobile web applications. But we have structured our contents in a way that will make it usable using technologies like natural language processing. This will enable us to build chat bots and digital assistants for illiterate rural women in developing countries in the near future.

Technology is the key to make our audio contents accessible. This is why we are developing a whole range of technological solutions that are capable of deploying our contents in very different scenarios. FonAid is a core technology, as it combines different input and output methods to deploy audiovisual content. That makes it a a very flexible system that can be expanded in the future.

Our goal is to implement several pilot projects in different settings/countries  and with different scopes. They should serve as lighthouse projects in a way that they showcase our approach and help to create awareness for this innovative way of providing health education to the illiterate. Those projects should also serve to get further insights in order to further streamline our approach.

In order to scale our impact we will be partnering with local NGOs or government organizations in key markets, like for example India. India is expected to have 500 million smartphone users by 2020. Yet India has the world's largest population of illiterate people. It will take at least another 65 years to achieve female youth literacy. 

URIDU partners with local non-government organizations (NGOs), cooperatives and other agencies to distribute FonAid in the last mile. We work with our local partners to identify the most appropriate contents for the women in their communities, and to design ways to get FonAid into the hands of the women who need it the most. We see ourselves as a facilitator which supports the community health worker in the field. We see our technology and our contents as a tool in the hands of those organizations and individuals that fight day by day to bring dignity and health to the marginalized.

About 10.000 women have access to our "hardware" (solar-powered MP3 players) and 2.000 women per day are accessing our contents online. We are constantly receiving feedback from about the health sensitization process such as this one from Goma, DR Congo: "We notice a change from the medical point of view, the reduction of cases of diarrheal diseases, the reduction ofcases of induced abortions and also the reduction of cases of typhoid fever."

We would expect 50.000 beneficiaries in 12 months and a million in 3 years. The 50.000 would be part of the current pilot projects and the million the result of partnering with major local NGOs in key markets. Our target group will be illiterate rural women and we expect measurable results regarding public health, economical empowerment and gender equality. We are experiencing those changes already on a small scale, and we are confident that our current results will be multiplicand during the scaling process.

We have a clear vision of our project combined with a strong business and technology background. 

We have a business model that is based on product sales (sales of the FonAid Box including customization), content creation (setup and/or creation of contents for the Box), services (consulting, training and after-sales support) and optionally advertising (advertising revenue sharing models). A partnership with a major iNGO could help us scale this model using an existing distribution infrastructure while at the same time creating awareness for our approach. 

Networking and mentoring could be useful for us. We see that we can thrill people once they learn about our approach - but we still need to generate more awareness. Strong partners could help us do that. We are hoping to get in touch with such partners and with mentors that could help us streamline our approach both economically, technologically and strategically.

Awareness and funding. People and organizations need to know about our approach. But to create this awareness you need to have more use cases, which require funding. We hope that our application will lead to a progress in both fields, by connecting us to potential partners, mentors and funders.