our web site is an initiative for spreading useful informations about grants, scholarships and differents oppoortunities for helping young people FROM AFRICA in their educational process.

It is a web site aiming in one place to group all studying possibilities, scholarships, grants, awards and various calls and opportunities opened to Africans

The idea is to help young people to accomplish their goals as well as to complete their education. This is a unique and useful media consisted of useful information.

Mobilizing the medical record is a high impact opportunity, EMR adoption has direct and well documented health impact. However, EMRs are rarely implemented successfully in poor areas because of hardware that is expensive, unfamiliar, or unavailable locally, lack of internet and hassles associated with data re-entry. These issues can be address by SIM based phones.

• EMR will be used more broadly and effectively if more health workers (not just physicians) gather and make use of medical data. Health workers are often out in the field where they do not directly contribute data to EMR.
• Data collected off-site is often recorded on paper; it must be entered into a database by a different (more trained with computers) person, in a different place, at a different time. Unnecessary steps increase confusion, reduce efficiency and accuracy.
• Patients currently do not remotely report health issues (I'm out of insulin needles, where can I get condoms?). This impeeds data collection in poor areas where transportation to a clinic may be a serious investment and many patients walk. Remote reporting would facilitate preventative medicine.

Our goal is to produce software that can:

• Use SIM-based mobile phones. They are cheap, durable, prevalent, require less training and are less likely to make workers a target for theft/mugging (relative to smart phones).
• Use OpenMRS, an open source EMR. OpenMRS manages hundreds of thousands of patients records; existing installations will be able to plug and play with our software, increasing our project's potential to scale.
• Health workers or patients send data via SMS, it will be added to patient's medical record. Physicians will be notified of urgent situations (a hemorrhaging home-based childbirth), and worker/patient may receive SMS advice from clinician or an automated SMS based on electronic records.
• Builds on, smooths interoperability with existing OSS like OpenRosa and Mesh4x.

• Data transfer optimized for low-signal environments.

An entire generation of youth in southern Africa is in crisis. In Swaziland alone, a country smaller than New Jersey and with a total population of one million people, UNICEF estimates there will be 120,000 orphaned children by 2010 – representing 22% of all children in Swaziland.

Kuluma is a project of YouthAssets’ whose mission is to empower youth in southern Africa, particularly those heading households, by engaging them with information and communication technologies to connect them to the knowledge they need to broaden their choices for the future. With this urgent need to support orphans, traditionally strong communities are being strained beyond capacity. Although their parents have died, youth are encouraged to stay on their homestead to continue to claim their house and land – a very valuable asset for food production and shelter. However, they remain isolated from support networks and resources without an adult caretaker and are responsible for raising their brothers and sisters on their own. A mechanism is needed to reduce their isolation and connect them to the resources they need.

Kuluma proposes to take advantage of the mobile phone network in Swaziland, our pilot country, to connect youth who are heading households and give them a voice.  Connecting small groups of youth via teleconferences, youth will have the opportunity to tell their story and give and receive support from their peers. Each group will receive a collective fund to manage and to decide collaboratively how to use the money (distribute the funds evenly, use it as capital to start small businesses, or any other idea) to support themselves sustainably and effectively. YouthAssets will learn from the youth themselves, and will use this knowledge to develop scalable strategies to reach more of the 10,000 orphan headed-households within Swaziland.

Please select Kuluma for USAID's Development 2.0 Challenge and help YouthAssets to support youth headed-households in Africa. Thank you.