Several months are gone, since some representatives of the Kilimanjaro Native Co-operative Union (KNCU) and the PharmAccess Foundation visited Twenty4’s office for the first time.
We remember that meeting not just as the beginning of a great collaboration, but also as one of the most challenging deals involving our creative team and our digital media department during the last year: the development of an application to educate people in rural areas about health, and to assist field operators in creating awareness about micro insurance programmes.
Finally the product has been released, and lots of pictures taken in the backstage are on our desks – nice memories for the staff who worked in video and photo production, as well as during the usability tests… but also an incredible feedback for the developers who coded the application, staying at office in Dar Es Salaam!
Discussions and debates about how technology could improv development are every day more frequent. This topic is one of the mainstream trend in our market, in Tanzania, as well as in many areas of East Africa. This is the reason why we think that our experience could be interesting, as an attempt to make advanced health services more accessible and effective in a large number of rural communities.
We worked thinking about the final target, mainly farmers approaching digital media for the first time. The application that we created is a rich multimedia presentation working on Android tablets, which are the equipment provided to the KNCU’s staff traveling around the villages to educate people about the micro insurance plan.
Internet connections are not available in many of these locations, so we arranged the application to work offline. Besides, a certain percentage of the target is composed by semi-illiterate adults, so we kept the interface very simple: just a few words, big icons and a large use of videos, cartoons and images. This way, we also minimized the time and effort needed to train the field workers.
The photogallery is worth more than too many words. And the portrait of an old farmer learning about health using the mobile application is the best reward for all the Twenty4’s professionals who worked on this project!