200,000 People Potentially Better Off After One Week of Hope Phones

Earlier this week, I wrote about the Hope Phones campaign, a new project that helps you turn your old, unwanted cell phones into a live saving tool for a more equitable global health system.

To recap, the project is being run by FrontlineSMS:Medic, and the basic idea is that when you give a clinic and it's community health works access to a mobile phone and simple software for tracking and responing to specific patient concerns, you can dramatically improve the breadth and quality of care, even in a rural setting.

Hope Phones works through a partnership with a phone reseller. They take your old donated phone, and donate to FrontlineSMS:Medic the money that would have otherwise been given to you. FrontlineSMS: Medic in turn buys the $10 cellphones they use standard in the field. It takes about 100-150 phones to get a rural clinic fully on the grid.

FrontlineSMS:Medic estimates that each phone we donate results in 2-3 phones they can provide to their partner clinics. Each of those phones, in turn, can help improve care for approximately 50 families.

So far, 336 phones have been donated. Taking that each of those become 2-3 phones in the field, that each of those phones help about 50 families get on the grid, and that each of those families represents 5 or so people (probably a low estimate).

That means that in a week, just a couple hundred people donating something they're no longer using means that over 200,000 people could see serious improvements in the quality of their health care access. Of course the real work will happen on the ground and in the implementation, and nothing is guaranteed, but that is a powerful statement about global connectivity.