Learners' Voice

An amazing session on technological solutions in education and healthcare took place today on the second day of the Asian Development Bank Annual General Meeting. The session started off with a video showcasing an example of how technology was used to provide a remote village in India with quality healthcare.

The village suffered in terms of healthcare simply because doctors and healthcare professionals were not motivated to work in such areas with bad living conditions. Villagers had to travel for hours and sometimes days for even the smallest medical intervention, resulting in the late detection and prevention of disease. The end result was catastrophic. After introducing technology in those remote areas, young doctors were motivated to work there because they got the chance to learn and be trained in using cutting-edge technology. The villagers obviously now had better access to healthcare which improved their overall state of health. The technology enabled the doctors to connect with other doctors from all over the world to help them care for their patients. It also provided an easy way to collect data and create databases on the health condition of the local people and other related information. The implementation of such technological solutions in other remote areas of India  – and elsewhere in the world - promises to solve a lot of problems in the healthcare system. But a question arises: Does providing technology in the health or education sectors truly improve quality?

I believe that there is no replacement for high-quality content when it comes to education or healthcare. There is no replacement for a good doctor or good teachers. What we do with technology is basically enable such great people to work better, more easily, and more efficiently. Content remains the end goal while technology is just the vehicle. It should be noted that there is an additional value to technology. In order to create effective technology we need a good understanding of our goal and the context in which this technology will operate, providing a golden opportunity to dig deep into our understanding of good education or healthcare or any other context in which we are trying to implement this technology. In education, new technology has enabled us to gain a better understanding of how we learn and effective ways to teach students and improve their critical thinking as well as their retention of this newly acquired knowledge.

Another example of using technology in education or healthcare is the concept of creating clouds. One of the panelists posed a question: Why commit so many resources to creating infrastructures and databases when you can make everything available on the cloud where it is easy to share and use? Indeed, some hospitals in India use smart dashboards where a patient’s information, diagnosis, treatment and even encounters in the hospital are all available via the cloud. This not only facilitates the provision of healthcare but also creates a system in which medical errors are easier to track and prevent. Prototypes of education clouds are currently being created in Europe and Africa in the hope that if they succeed they will be adopted by more educational institutions.

The focus on education and healthcare in the session highlighted the fact that increasing access to technology has been greatest in privileged areas, enabling users to develop and improve their communities. This has widened the gap between developed and developing communities. The only way to narrow the gap is by upgrading health and education, since these are the two areas in which underdeveloped communities can really improve their fortunes.

So does the introduction of ICT improve the economy? The short answer to that is YES! When India started using technology, there were four pillars to the accomplishment of effective ICT:

• Providing technology platforms, such as laptops, clouds, etc.
• Knowing the context to optimize the use of technology
• User skills and the importance of partnering with local implementers who can provide training and support
  
• A cultural sense of innovation, which means the desire and the motivation to be innovative and use technology

These four pillars were assessed and it was found that the economy did indeed improve after providing relevant and effective ICT.  

Collaboration between technology professionals and other actors such as governments and NGOs is essential too and is based on two main factors: a goal that is shared between these partners, and a deficiency in one of the partners that the others can basically counteract. The parable of the blind man and the lame man was cited: the blind man carries the lame man and the lame man guides him along the way. Only in this way of providing mutual assistance can partnerships truly flourish. 

Nour Barakat