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African solutions to reduce poverty
The new Ericsson Innovation Center in sub-Saharan Africa will develop mobile multimedia applications in health, education, agriculture, and small business development. This represents yet another step in Ericsson’s ongoing commitment to use its core technology for social and economic benefits.
September 25, 2008
The Innovation Center will include three application development hubs in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya.
The Innovation Center will initially develop mobile applications focusing on the improvement of health services. These will include mobile multimedia health solutions that enable health workers to gather, monitor, and share data on things like births, deaths and epidemics, and to use smart mobile decision support tools in their daily work. In addition, community portals will be created to allow doctors and patients to communicate on a regular basis. Subscription-type services that give users regular notifications such as chronic medicine reminders will also be developed at the center.
Jan Embro, President of Ericsson in sub-Saharan Africa, says: “Mobile communications significantly improve the quality of life, providing the tools to deliver enormous socioeconomic benefits to people in developing countries. Connectivity helps to offset a lack of resources, particularly in rural areas, and provides access to a range of services, including education and healthcare.
“Ericsson’s vision is to be the prime driver in an all-communicating world. A cornerstone of this ambition is the application of our core technology to help bridge the digital divide, and simultaneously drive new business development.”
The Innovation Center aims to stimulate local entrepreneurship, employment and business development by providing tools for local developer communities in and around the three new hubs to create their own applications. It will foster a good environment for the creation of new small businesses throughout Africa.
The applications developed there will initially support the Millennium Villages project - an initiative reaching more than half a million people across 10 countries that aims to lift rural African communities out of extreme poverty. The ultimate goal of the center’s work will be to scale up the successful applications and to develop business cases that enable network operators to introduce and expand mobile broadband services in Africa and other emerging markets. The emphasis is on developing affordable, sustainable applications and services for rural communities.
This initiative is a concrete example of Ericsson fulfilling its commitment to the Millennium Development Goals - internationally agreed targets to combat extreme poverty - while at the same time stimulating business and building on its global experience.
