Liberia

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Liberia Closes Its Borders To Stop Ebola

Jen Christensen | CNN.com | July 28, 2014

The deadliest Ebola outbreak in history continues to plague West Africa as leaders scramble to stop the virus from spreading.  Over the weekend, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf closed most of the country's borders...

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Medical Records Reveal Deceased Texas Ebola Patient Sent Home With High Fever

Lauren Gambino | The Guardian | October 10, 2014

Thomas Duncan, the first person to die of Ebola in the US, was released from hospital with a 103F fever on his first visit, despite telling a nurse he had recently travelled from Africa and exhibiting key symptoms of the deadly virus, it was revealed on Friday...

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Nigeria Government Confirms Ebola Case In Megacity Of Lagos

Felix Onuah and Tom Miles | Reuters | July 25, 2014

A Liberian man who died in Nigeria's commercial capital Lagos on Friday tested positive for the deadly Ebola virus, Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu said.  Patrick Sawyer, a consultant for the Liberian finance ministry in his 40s, collapsed on Sunday after flying into Lagos, a city of 21 million people, and was taken from the airport and put in isolation in a local hospital...

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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 Government Partnership Celebrates Open Innovation in Africa

As diverse delegates gather in Cape Town this week for the OGP regional meeting, we reflect on open innovation, ODI projects and promising initiatives in the continent. This week, South Africa hosts the third Open Government Partnership (OGP) Africa Regional Meeting 2016. The two-day event brings together a wide range of delegates from African governments and civil society, startups and international organisations. It offers a platform to share lessons from programmes across the continent, with a particular focus on promoting sustainable development...

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Open Source App Takes on Ebola and Mental Health in Liberia

Angie Nyakoon and Amanda Gbarmo Ndorbor are two outspoken and energetic women who oversee the Mental Health Unit at the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (MOHSW) in Liberia. Together, they're applying a new open source app called mHero (that was first used to help them deal with the Ebola crisis) to the mental health issues that have arisen in the aftermath of the epidemic due to displacement and abandonment...mHero provides a trusted channel that facilitates two-way communication using SMS and interactive voice response for sending and receiving critical information to and from frontline health workers, in real time...

Rethink the School of Tomorrow: Africa as the Starting Hypothesis

Stéphan-Eloïse Gras and the Africa 4 Tech team | LinkedIn | July 8, 2016

With 200 million inhabitants between the ages of 15 and 24, Africa is today the youngest continent on the planet. These young Africans will be the future leaders and the driving force of the continent’s economic, social and cultural development. A well-functioning inclusive educational system is thus essential to tackle tomorrow’s challenges. For several years, governments and large institutions on the planet, have attempted to implement an educational system relevant to the continent’s challenges. Considerable efforts have been made to catch up on an accumulated backlog in this crucial sector, allowing to tremendously enhance access to primary education...

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Revealed: The World's Most & Least Advanced Countries

Matthew Bishop | LinkedIn | April 4, 2014

UNTIL recently, the popular way to compare the progress of one country relative to another was to use the size of their economies. America had the biggest GDP (and almost the biggest per capita GDP), so it stood to reason it was the most advanced country in the world.

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Team Bahmni at the OpenMRS Worldwide Summit

ThoughtWorks first began contributing to OpenMRS in 2006 and since that time, we've had over fifty committers to OpenMRS in GitHub. Incidentally, one in every seven OpenMRS contributor in GitHub is a ThoughtWorker! Naturally, in 2013, when we had the opportunity to build Bahmni, an open source hospital information system, we choose OpenMRS as the underlying Electronic Medical Records System (EMR). Bahmni leverages the mature data model and APIs of OpenMRS, whilst providing an out-of-the-box system that can be immediately used by hospitals.

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The Challenges of Bringing Health Care to Everyone, Everywhere

Kate Torgovnick May | Ideas.Ted.Com | June 8, 2017

Around the world right now, more than one billion people don’t have access to basic health care. That means no checkups, no vaccinations, no medications, all because of the environment in which people live. They might be too poor to visit a clinic, or they might live too far from one, but the result is the same, and often fatal. It’s a problem that troubles many. Take physician Raj Panjabi, TED Prize winner and co-founder of Last Mile Health, who trains community health workers to bring care door-to-door in remote communities in Liberia (TED Talk: No one should die because they live too far from a doctor)...

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This Aid Agency Is Using Chatbots to Beat World Hunger

Lynset Chutel | Quartz | September 4, 2017

Smartphones and chatbots have made services from banking to transportation more accessible across Africa. Now, aid agencies are hoping they can do the same with food.
The UN’s World Food Program (WFP), has been experimenting with text and Facebook messenger chatbots to monitor food insecurity in hard-to-reach areas, turning smartphones and social media into lifelines for the most vulnerable of refugees...

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Two Years After The Book: “A Digital Liberia”, How Digital Is Liberia?

Darren Wilkins | Daily Observer | September 18, 2012

It’s been over two years since I first submitted the final manuscript of what would later be my first book titled, “A Digital Liberia: How Electrons, Information and Market Forces Will Determine Liberia’s Future” A lot has happened since then. In the following paragraphs, I briefly discuss the progress made in Liberia’s ICT sector since the book was published. Read More »

U.S. Hospitals Aren't 'Ebola-Ready'

Olga Khazan | The Atlantic | October 17, 2014

How did two nurses, both wearing protective gear, get Ebola in a Dallas hospital? That's the frightening question behind the growing criticism of the CDC and Dallas's Texas Health Presbyterian hospital...

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U.S. To Begin Ebola Hospital Equipment Lift To Liberia

David Morgan | Reuters | September 17, 2014

The first planeload of hospital equipment in the U.S. military's battle against West Africa's deadly Ebola outbreak will arrive in Liberia on Friday, a senior administration official said on Wednesday...

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UNICEF Launches RapidPro Open Source App Store

Paul Adepoju | Human IPO | September 23, 2014

The United Nations International Children Emergency Fund (UNICEF) has launched RapidPro, an open-source platform of apps that can help governments to quickly deliver important information in real time. It can also be used to connect communities to lifesaving services...

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