Source: UN Foundation's Flickr Stream

Last week at the GSMA's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, on the one-year anniversary of the formation of the mHealth Alliance, Orange Healthcare announced that it had joined the mHealth Alliance. Orange plans to leverage the Alliance's resources and partners to bring sustainable mobile health projects to scale in West Africa.

A year ago this month the Rockefeller Foundation, the United Nations Foundation and the Vodafone Foundation launched the mHealth Alliance. The Vodafone and UN Partnership, in conjunction with groups like the World Health Organization and other NGOs, had been running mHealth programs on the ground in Africa for at least three years prior to founding the mHealth Alliance.

According to the UN Foundation, “The Alliance acts as an umbrella organization to complement, draw together, and expand upon the mHealth initiatives of multiple organizations around the world by creating research, filling gaps, making connections, and forging public-private partnerships in support of innovation and projects that address global health needs.” Today the Alliance also includes the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the GSM Association, and—its newest member— Orange Healthcare, the healthcare division within France Telecom.

Orange offers wireless service in several African countries where it also works with NGOs and health partners to implement innovative mobile health projects such as Mobinil and Orange Botswana.

“The development of health solutions through mobile devices is revolutionizing healthcare delivery in developing countries," Thierry Zylberberg, Executive Vice President of Orange Healthcare said. "Orange Healthcare is already working on projects in Africa that are using mobiles to improve prevention efforts, patient care, treatment support and health data collection.”

Future projects are under consideration in Kenya, Senegal, Burkina-Faso and Mali and will be developed within the framework of the mHealth Alliance.

The addition of Orange Healthcare to the mHealth Alliance points to the growing corporate interest in and commitment to the use of mobile technologies to improve healthcare in the developing world, according to the group. Growing numbers of partnerships across the globe coupled with the increasingly widespread availability of mHealth solutions seek to bring the Millennium Development Goals a little closer to within reach, the Alliance states in a release.

For more details read the full press release.
For more photos of mHealth in emerging markets, check out the U.N. Foundation’s flickr stream.