gmeltdown

Today I had this nice opportunity to partially attend a PEPFAR partners meeting at the Safari Park Hotel. I shall not assume it is obvious that  PEPFAR  stands for (United States) President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Kenya is said to be one of the countries with the biggest allocation of PEPFAR grants, largely through USAID and CDC . Every year, billions of Kenya Shillings are handled as grants from PEPFAR within the country, so much so that it is almost a sub-economy in itself. PEPFAR, essentially the philanthropy of the American People appears so immense in the health sector that the aid should ideally overflow to the ICT sector through eHealth. For more on related development dynamics see my earlier post on who really are our genuine development partners . Over time, PEPFAR leadership may have discovered that it is not possible to practice philanthropy in the air - it has to be in someone's jurisdiction -  who needs to care that they Americans ...

A couple of days back I wrote my first article on the  the fifth annual OpenMRS implementers meeting . Immediately after posting the article I checked my meeting notes and thought I would need to write on a few more insights that appeared equally profound. Consider this a continuation of the lessons I described in the earlier post . Lesson 4. Open source is great; best with a global community One of the big debates in many developing countries is whether to adopt an Open Source policy for their e-government initiatives. It appears key decision makers have began to appreciate the benefits of such a policy. However there needs to be further understanding that a mere application of open source technologies for development of government software systems is not enough. There is need to embrace the concept of open source from a global community perspective.  A software expert or two can sit with an health care expert and develop an awesome, robust, feature-rich EMR or Pharmacy ...