Ideas worth spreading

Medical tech designed to meet Africa's needs

1,089,977 views |

Soyapi Mumba |

TEDGlobal 2017

• August 2017

In sub-Saharan Africa, power outages, low technology penetration, slow internet and understaffed hospitals plague health care systems. To make progress on these problems in Malawi, TED Fellow Soyapi Mumba and his team created a new system from scratch -- from the software that powers their electronic health records to the infrastructure used to support it. In this quick, hopeful talk, Mumba shares how his jack-of-all-trades mindset can help reshape health care in low-resource environments.

In sub-Saharan Africa, power outages, low technology penetration, slow internet and understaffed hospitals plague health care systems. To make progress on these problems in Malawi, TED Fellow Soyapi Mumba and his team created a new system from scratch -- from the software that powers their electronic health records to the infrastructure used to support it. In this quick, hopeful talk, Mumba shares how his jack-of-all-trades mindset can help reshape health care in low-resource environments.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

Learn more about Baobab Health, a team that uses locally-based engineers to develop suitable interventions for health care problems in Malawi.

About the speaker

Soyapi Mumba

Technology innovator

See speaker profile

TED Fellow Soyapi Mumba creates technology solutions for low-resource environments.

G.P. Douglas, O.J. Gadabu, S. Joukes , S. Mumba , M.V. McKay, A. Ben-Smith , et al. | PLoS Med, 2010 | Article

"Using Touchscreen Electronic Medical Record Systems to Support and Monitor National Scale-Up of Antiretroviral Therapy in Malawi"

Dayo Olopade | Mariner, 2014 | Book

The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa

The Bright Continent calls for a necessary shift in our thinking about Africa. Olopade shows us that the increasingly globalized challenges Africa faces can and must be addressed with the tools Africans are already using to solve these problems themselves. Africa's ability to do more with less — to transform bad government and bad aid into an opportunity to innovate — is a clear ray of hope amidst the dire headlines and a powerful model for the rest of the world.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

Learn more about Baobab Health, a team that uses locally-based engineers to develop suitable interventions for health care problems in Malawi.