Startup Idea #111: SMS based platform for delivering life saving content to the poor

This is a powerful article that covers a lot what Umair Haque has been saying. It offers a more down to earth (and easier to understand!) perspective of the great changes that we are going to see.

One of his paragraphs gives a great idea for startup:
Solar water disinfection (SODIS): put water which is contaminated with disease organisms into a plastic soda pop bottle and leave it in the sun all day. You can use a tinfoil reflector, or put it on a black sheet metal heat collector if you want to be fancy. The UV light and the heat kill most of what would make you sick.

This is a technique you can teach by well-phrased SMS messages. 5 million people a year die of dirty water, many of them children. SODIS won’t get all of them, and it’s not a perfect technique, but it’s easier to get people started on and odds-are many people who only have bad water to drink live in places with abundant sun and available discarded plastic soda bottles…

What if we can aggregate all these useful life-saving information, and organise them into easy to understand instructions which can be sent through SMS? This, I think, is another form of organisation that Umair Haque talks about in his manifesto for next industrial economy.

It is about organising information in a way that the people who needs them the most can assess and understand it.

If you have ideas on how to get this going, do drop a comment.

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Posted in: education 2.0,healthcare 2.0,startup business ideas