The concept of leapfrogging has been around since the early stages of the Internet stock bubble of the beginning of the last decade. The notion is that developing nations can learn from the experiences of the industrialized first world nations and skip generations of costly, inefficient, and/or environmentally damaging technologies and restructure and begin implementing more advanced, less costly technology.
So for example, rather than build an energy infrastructure dependent on fossil fuels, a developing country can leapfrog to solar power, mini-hydro, and wind turbine electricity production. Rather than setting up hundreds of miles of copper wire for landline telephones, leapfrog straight into cellular phone technologies. Not only is there a positive environmental sustainability issue being addressed, but you also address a social dimension. People would be able to get access to resources and technologies that they never had access to before. Currently nearly a third of the world’s population of 7 billion people has no electricity, and another third of the world’s population have very poor access to electricity. Renewable power production has the potential to change all of that.
Addressing such infrastructure concerns also promotes positive changes in those societies that aid in righting the wrongs of social injustices in such societies, and easier to address matters of health, education, and gender equity.
Health informatics is a field which is based on the intersection of information technology with medical science. Kallo, Inc. specializes in providing health informatics in such a way as to allow a developing country to leapfrog into a functioning healthcare infrastructure where one barely existed before. For instance, they provide technology that allows for mobile medical facilities to collect medical data on patients and use wireless technology to send the data to a central facility for complete diagnosis. The data can then be used not just to help the individual patients but studied as a whole to recognize and specify actions against disease trends.
It is poverty that causes overcrowded health care clinics that are unable to maintain a standard of sanitation, which allows for the spread of disease. It is poverty that stigmatizes culture to be part of the source of the suffering of people in developing nations. A rising healthcare infrastructure plays a role in aiding to eliminate abject poverty. The spread of diseases can actually be propelled by poverty and oppressive socioeconomic structures. That is a key reason why vaccinations against diseases are so important.
This past January, Kallo signed a $200 million supply agreement with the Republic of Guinea, and has begun work on the country’s healthcare infrastructure with their RuralCare and MobileCare services. The country continues to fight a raging Ebola epidemic that has cost the lives of 101 people, and has spread to the neighboring country of Liberia, where it killed 10 people. Two new cases of Ebola virus have occurred in yet another neighboring country, Sierra Leone. The Ebola virus kills 90% of the people it infects, and is ultimately containable, but lack of medical infrastructure in Guinea is making this difficult as experts believe the outbreak may continue to grow for another four months. As Kallo and others helps build up Guinea’s healthcare infrastructure, such disease outbreaks should be more easily controlled, contained, and treated in the future.
For more information, visit www.kalloinc.ca
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