| By Gavin Chait,
on 06 March 2007
|
 Adam Smith - ethical investor
He would be beaming about a recent technological innovation. Voxiva, a United States company, has built a system that lets health workers send reports by cellphone directly from the field. First deployed five years ago to track disease outbreaks in the Amazon basin, Voxiva’s system is also being used in Indonesia for avian flu reporting and in India in testing of a new drug for leishmaniasis, a disease spread by sand flies.
Up until recently things worked somewhat differently in Rwanda. “Information from clinics is written on a piece of paper that a porter carries by hand to the district before the information can be brought to Kigali,” the country’s capital, says Dr Innocent Nyaruhirira, who holds the cabinet-level post of minister for HIV/AIDS. “We are a country of one thousand hills, so it often takes one month to receive a message from the field about a disease outbreak or drug shortage.”
Operating through servers in Kigali that are owned by the South African telecommunications operator MTN, the Rwanda system gets field clinic reports via text message, a voice-call system or on the Internet using a computer or Internet-enabled cellphone.
Prahalad certainly didn’t originate the idea of letting market conditions take care of poverty. Adam Smith in 1776 coined the phrase, “the invisible hand” to describe the way in which self-interest often results in the most good for the most people. In the “Theory of Moral Sentiments” written earlier in 1759, Smith makes the case for sympathy in business and investments; the idea of a moral compass.
Each generation requires a vision that resonates most closely with the age. Prahalad has stimulated debate and discussion. With clever companies like Voxiva developing clever solutions to communication problems it looks as if people are starting to listen.
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