Guatemala

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Can Cell Phones Stop Crime In The World's Murder Capitals?

Uri Friedman | The Atlantic | May 7, 2014

...In recent years, police have courted cell phone-toting citizens as crime "censors" everywhere from Washington, D.C. to the tiny Kenyan village of Lanet Umoja. But the practice has gained particular traction in Latin America, which, as the UN reported in April, has the highest rate of criminal violence on the planet (the region accounts for 8 percent of the world's population and a third of its murders)...

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Five Humanitarian Crises Largely Overlooked in 2015

Anastasia Moloney | Thomson Reuters Foundation | December 16, 2015

From civil war and urban gang violence to drought, some humanitarian crises around the world receive less media attention and donor funding than others and are less visible. Below are the top five humanitarian crises of 2015, in no particular order, which aid agencies say deserve more attention on the world stage: Rampant gang violence, poverty and the lack of jobs push hundreds of people a month to leave the 'Northern Triangle' nations of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala and seek work and refuge in the United States and other Latin American countries...

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Guatemala Adopts iHRIS To Manage Health Workforce

Devika Chawla | CapacityPlus | June 6, 2013

Guatemala is the newest country to adopt the open source iHRIS software for tracking, managing, and planning the health workforce. At least 14 other countries are actively using the software. Read More »

In Guatemala, Shifts in Health Care Strand Communities

Colleen Kimmett | Aljazeera America | February 25, 2016

...Downloaded on the phone was an open-source app, Kawok, that allowed the community health workers to create patient profiles and access educational videos and best-practice protocols. They had direct lines to a doctor who worked for TulaSalud, whom they could call any time of day or night in an emergency, and the numbers of auxiliary nurses at nearby health centers. The idea was to create a network of professionals, resources and emergency services that community health workers could reach at the touch of a button. “Anytime I could call and ask for help, and they gave it to me,” says Pop Pop. “It was a really useful tool.”...

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Nineteen Countries Save $149 Million With Open Source Health Workforce Information Systems

Staff Writer | Capacity Plus | March 6, 2014

Nineteen countries are now using iHRIS, a free and open source human resources information system, to support over 810,000 health worker records. It would cost more than $149 million in licensing fees alone for these countries to support a similar number of records with a proprietary system purchased from for-profit companies.

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Open Hardware Groups Spread Across the Globe

After our group of friends founded a small open hardware community in El Salvador a few years ago, we felt alone in the region. The open hardware movement had developed in a creative explosion of projects and (thanks to the popularization of 3D printing and digital technologies such as Arduino) under a common understanding of how to develop new physical products. The fact that all these people came together so quickly and in so many places at the same time made it harder for people to find each other than it was during the open source software community's development, which found its place within the Linux community and grew through events such as FLISOL in many different Latin American countries...

TulaSalud: An m-health System for Maternal and Infant Mortality Reduction in Guatemala

Andrés Martínez-Fernández et al. | Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare | March 12, 2015

The Guatemalan NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) TulaSalud has implemented an m-health project in the Department of Alta Verapaz. This Department has 1.2 million inhabitants (78% living in rural areas and 89% from indigenous communities) and in 2012, had a maternal mortality rate of 273 for every 100,000 live births. This m-health initiative is based on the provision of a cell phone to community facilitators (CFs). The CFs are volunteers in rural communities who perform health prevention, promotion and care. Thanks to the cell phone, the CFs have become tele-CFs who able to carry out consultations when they have questions; send full epidemiological and clinical information related to the cases they attend to; receive continuous training; and perform activities for the prevention and promotion of community health through distance learning sessions in the Q’eqchí and/or Poqomchi’ languages...

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