Midweek Check-In: Telemedicine 2: Tech for Local Languages
Tech meets mother tongue 🤝👑👑
Hola Dear Innovator 👋
Feeling good in your corner of the world?
You should, cos we come bearing good news….
🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁
The Good News is that if you’ve been steady on your grind since June started, you should now have 26 days of evidence to show for it 😁
[🫲Prezzdent 🫱 General 💪 among the techies . We salute you🫡….]
Can’t wait to see what tech magic you whip up in July! 💯
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Story Time!
Aïcha, a cassava farmer in a remote part of Senegal, has been experiencing serious stomach pains. He’s too poor to travel thousands of kilometres to see a doctor in the big city of Dakar, and so he resorts to a telemedicine appointment instead; a beacon of hope in a desperate time.
Buuuut, there’s a problem.
Even though he has somehow managed to navigate the solution, Aïcha speaks Pulaar and the doctor operates in English 🫡 He’s going to get help, no doubt, but there’s a very high chance that he’ll be misdiagnosed because he can’t tell the doctor how he’s really feeling when they both speak different languages.
How about this….
Dr. Ann, a pediatrician in Lagos, Nigeria, has been using a telemedicine platform that allows her to consult with a mother in a remote Igbo-speaking village.
When she’d first started out in her profession, she often enlisted the help of colleagues to translate for her during her consulting sessions. Most times, the mothers wouldn’t even visit the hospital with their babies because of the language barrier and the hospital’s distance from their houses.
Thankfully, the telemedicine platform that she now uses helps her to translate the consultation in real-time, ensuring clear communication and culturally appropriate advice. And to top it all, it’s all from the comfort of their home!
These are all imaginary scenarios, of course, but what if we can make it real? 🤔
With tech, the goal has been and will always be to constantly push the boundaries of what’s possible, and tech in the world of health and medicine is every inch of that boundary pusher💃💃
Across Africa, there’s a silent barrier that stands between millions of people and proper healthcare, and the culprit is the language that is spoken1. With a continent that is estimated to have over 3,000 languages2, there’s bound to be some confusion along the way 😢
What if Tech can remedy that?
Telemedicine harnesses the advantage of digital tools to make healthcare more accessible to people on the go. Dear Innovator, how cool would it be if these platforms can also be equipped with translation capabilities to support a wide range of languages and dialects 🤔😍😍This inclusivity is crucial in a continent as linguistically diverse as Africa.
With telemedicine and healthcare in general, tech can be more than just a tool; it can be a transformative force for change, ensuring that everyone, regardless of where they live or what language they speak, can receive the care they deserve.
Afterall, Innovation and Change always go hand-in-hand 🫶
Some memes to get you through the rest of your day…
Show no fear, Techies! 🫡
Guilty much? 👀
Everyone is bound to experience this at least once in their lifetime 😅…
Currency Exchange Problem, Where? 🤷🤷
Not on Monirates’ watch!
Led by Nnnena Nkata and her co-founder Moses Peter, Monirates is making a difference with payments and currency exchange across 🌍Africa
At the just concluded The Next Web (TNW) Conference, 2024, held in the Netherlands, she shared the drive behind their vision and what they aim to achieve in a one-minute pitch.
We always love a reason to celebrate a member of the Consonance Community of Innovators and just like all our community members do, Monirates is ticking all the right boxes for us ✅✅
Cheers to more Ws!✨✨
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Sooooo, you’ll be back on Saturday, yeah? Aitt 🤝