Socio-Tech: Made in South Africa

Socio-Tech finds socio-technical methods and the corresponding education to enable the local software industry to contribute to socio-economic development.

The project is based on the collaborative creation of innovative ICT solutions to facilitate the improvement of the well-being of a community in tension.  It does so by addressing both the needs of the care giver and other stakeholders who are involved in providing a home-based healthcare service.

Complex socio-economic factors threaten the well-being of communities and often ad-hoc ICT solutions are proposed without addressing the specific aspects that will influence their successful adoption.  When approaching these challenges, a number of important issues are overlooked such as:

• the complex nature of the problems and environment;
• the need for the solution to be sustainable;
• the factors specific to the local context;
• the educational needs of training ICT practitioners and citizens as the users of the ICT solutions;
• the lack of economic development which can lead to unemployment and inflation;
• social inequality exacerbated by insufficient social services and can lead to social issues such as drug abuse;
• insufficient education; and
• lack of appropriateness and use of technology.

Meeting the challenges

• Home-based healthcare programmes are currently run by NGOs and are difficult to manage given financial and personnel constraints.  All administration and reporting related to the work is often done manually.
• From the perspective of the patients, many of them are ill informed about their illnesses and this is a direct result of caregivers – who most often work without any financial reward  – not having the capacity to explain and inform patients about their conditions.
• Home-based healthcare differs slightly from region to region so it is imperative to come up with a solution that helps caregivers in different regions who all have their own particular sets of challenges.

Collaborating towards effective solutions

Socio-Tech believes that the workable solution is to incorporate technology into administrative processes, which will go a long way to helping care-givers cope with an exceedingly heavy workload.
The challenge is to develop information technology resources to ensure that caregivers and associated stakeholders have more time available to undertake their primary goal, which is to take care of their patients.

Another positive spinoff is that of technical data capturing within the administrative process:  information will be more accurate and will ensure that Government has good quality data from which to work for future research and solution-finding exercises on a national level.

Implementation aspects

The main criteria in the project is to develop solutions together with healthcare providers.  The solution will not be high tech given the technological constraints of the healthcare providers.

It is important to understand the challenges in order to develop a solution, so the first  few months of Socio-Tech’s life cycle have been spent understanding the complexities associated with home-based healthcare.  This process took the form of both pre-work and field-work activities.

Planned ahead is a context mapping exercise where the landscape will be analysed in order to identify the activities and services of all stakeholders.  From this a landscape model will be developed that will map out the full context.

The solution development phase will be based on the specific scenario and the identification of the relevant touchpoints within the healthcare process.  The design will be participatory and there will be continuous refinement and many iterations.

Project findings to date

To date it appears as if a low-tech mobile solution will be a good option as this technology is both available and widely understood in the environment.  It was also learned that the best method to inform healthcare providers would be through visual media using  pictures to teach and tell stories and also making use of video.

Another finding is that it is important for healthcare providers to be educated; they need to be trained on how to use technology, thus team members have taught the healthcare providers how to blog in order for them to share their stories with other healthcare providers and a wider, global audience.

Also identified is the need to develop a metadata repository where the elements associated with home-based healthcare can be defined.

For more information visit the Kujali website.