Maisha Marefu Project

"If you could save a child's life for free, wouldn't you?"

My project focuses on the infant mortality rate in Africa.  This issue does not hold any particular interest with me, the reason I am focusing on it is because I truly believe social media can help resolve the problem.  Despite popular belief, the root of this problem is not lack of doctors.  Instead, the problem is lack of communication between tribes and doctors.  This is due to many factors that are all contributors to the underlying theme of poverty.  This is where I believe my project is unique to other social good projects.  I am not proposing that we provide African tribes with any tangible items such as food, technology, or money.  This is because I believe throwing money at an issue is simply, 'providing them with fish, as opposed to teaching them how to fish.'  My plan is to use teach African mothers how to become self-sufficient by using the resources majority of African tribes already have (radio).  The project in a nutshell is as follows: An expecting mother will radio her delivery date into a central hub, this hub will be based somewhere in Africa, from there computer programmers allow amateur computer users (such as you and me) to act as middle-man of communication between the tribes and doctors.  Doctors will receive information on the location of expecting mothers in two ways.  The first way is that the central computer hub will be responsible for sending an SMS text of the date and location of the mother. The second way the doctor receives information is visually, and that is where I come in.

Much like Ushahidi employed mash-up mapping to visually display the violence in Kenya, Maisha Marefu is going to have a website that allows users to make annotations based on the timing and location of the crisis.  Providing people with a visual aspect is beneficial for two reasons.  The first is that maps are free of a language barrier, this means that Africans as well as any other culture can read the same map.  This plays into the second benefit of visual mapping out crises which is consistency.  News reports on crises can be skewed, but there is no possible way to be biased with google maps.  At this point this may sound extremely beneficial to Africa, but where is the motivation for others to join the cause. This is where I want to start a campaign (facebook group, blog, etc.) that states, "If you could save a child's life for free, wouldn't you?"  The way this works is that the traveling doctors will also use social media to document the happenings within each tribe.  By opening accounts in Twitter and Flickr, doctors can tweet information and post pictures of the projects progress.  This inadvertently allows users to visually track how their personal contribution has helped the overall infant mortality rate.  Since I am the creator of this project I have an additional duty.  Since infant mortality rate is not a sudden crisis, or disaster, it is commonly overshadowed by events like hurricanes or violence.  This is why it is my responsibility to spread the Maisha Marefu project by word of mouth.  By joining/liking facebook pages, posting blogs, and pictures on Flickr, I hope to develop a following of people of social media users.  The cool part about this following is that if they are technically savvy enough to follow me, then they are technically savvy enough to participate in making mash-up maps.  In summary, this is a self-sustaining project.  In relation to cognitive surplus, there are already enough internet users to donate a small amount of time to help with infant mortality rate.  Most importantly, if successful this project will improve a crisis situation without asking for any money.