Good afternoon, this talk is dedicated to Dr. Doug Anders -- he was my adviser for five
years in this fine institution.
I feel good to be here.
And I brought for you a bouquet of Roses.
These Roses come from Kenya.
Kenya is one of the largest exporters of Roses from Africa.
They export over 200 varieties of Roses.
Here these Roses, harvested barely fort-eight hours ago.
And they are here in full or partial bloom ready to be consumed from their beauty and
perfume.
And you might ask, how did these Roses get here so fresh?
My answer would be information, communication, and technology.
And this is how it goes: the roses are harvested by 6 a.m. in the morning, and soaked in chilling
water for 6 hours.
Then each rose is finally picked and analyzed for opening stage, color, bud size, stem strength,
and the strength of the stem, and then put into beautiful bunches.
Each bunch is then given a number.
That number is traceable from the farmhouses in Kenya all the way to the florist in the
world over.
Once the boxes are numbered they are loaded on refrigerated trucks and then the trucks
leave for Jumba la Mtwana International airport, and by 4 p.m. these flowers are cargo in an
aircraft headed to Amsterdam.
They get to Amsterdam by 2 a.m. in the morning, and quickly shuttled over to the FloraHolland
center in Aalsmeer.
This is the largest floral auction house in the world.
Over 45 million flowers are auctioned daily.
The facility is the size of the city of Monaco, and people are connected around the world,
florists and brokers, are connected around the world to this facility by the Internet.
And at 6 a.m. the buzzer goes off, and the bidding starts.
The name of the flower shows up, the bud size, the color, the name of the growing, and if
the price is right, press a button and the lot is cast.
By 10 a.m., the frenzy's over, and 45 million flowers have been auctioned.
Within 2 hours, these flowers are bound by truck, train, and airplane for the rest of
Europe, Asia, and the United States, waiting for the expectant florist.
And, within the next morning, by the next morning, the gifting person has the fresh
flowers.
This has been has described as a logistic miracle.
Think about it.
This logistic miracle results in flowers in a vase that wither away within 12 to 18 days.
And, if that distribution system breaks down on Valentine's Day or Mother's day, women
lose the trust in the floral industry.
The unfortunate reality is that, in as much as that would be breaking news, every day,
the distribution of essential drugs breaks down and is not breaking news.
And you may ask me, how does that happen, when the noble pharmaceutical industry is
10 thousand times the size of the floral industry, whereby to this day there are many mothers
who walk into clinics and they are looking for one essential drug, and their babies don't
have it, they die of treatable diseases.
The reality is, amongst all the pump and hype, technology transfer in health sector is behind.
Here is a story in Kenya.
In Kenya, 80 percent of the population receives care from rural hospitals, from rural dispensaries
and health centers.
Those centers are suppose to receive drugs that are subsidized by the government, by
the world bank, the African Development Bank, by USA ID, your tax dollars, and if everything
goes right, those drugs will be available for free or at a low price.
However, what happens is that those drugs are distributed on a 90 to 100 day cycle.
90 to -- that's four times a year.
So, think about it.
Coke, beer, SIM cards are distributed in these same villages every several day.
We're talking about flowers from these same villages around the world, daily.
And it takes 100 to 90 days to get drugs.
So what happens is that health workers have to do everything they can to quantify and
focus the drugs they need for every 90 days.
I ask every one of you, if you were asked to quantify the groceries and supplies for
your house for the next 90 days.
You'd say, Moka, I can't do it.
That is overwhelming.
And indeed it is.
So what the health workers have to do, the nurses have to do, is they have a spreadsheet
with 163 drugs and 9 columns of information -- opening stock balance, closing stock balance,
unit of measure, and so on and so forth.
That is 1,140 calculations they have to do in order to be able to get the drugs they
need.
Your guess is as good as mine.
By day 30 they are out of 30 percent of drugs.
By day 60, 75 percent out of drugs.
And by day 90, two drugs per them all.
If anything that can treat something at all.
Now, put yourself in the shoes of that mother who wakes up at five-o'clock in the morning
with a baby on the back, the child has fevered all night.
She comes to the clinic and she's given a prescription.
At that moment, in that instance of disappointment, that mother has been asked to make a choice,
between whether to buy meal for that baby, or buy seed or buy fertilizer or buy SIM card,
or maybe buy a pad for her school aged daughter to go to school.
A calculation to that: over 33 million dollars are shifted away from the homesteads of the
poor towards this open market, every year, and that is conservative.
But then unfortunately, the drugs in the open market are 3 to 5 times more expensive and
40% a counterfeit.
So, the reality is that the distribution system for essential drugs is broken.
So, with that in mind, we know for sure, that if every community has to survive, they have
to better manage their scarce resources.
And 33 million dollars going to the open market is waste.
It reminds me of an African fairytale.
The tale of the lion, the goat, and the banana, where the king wants to have a party and says
I need a lion, a goat, and a banana.
And he calls the farmer, come here.
The farmer comes and says whoa, where do I get the goat, lion, and banana from?
Well get it from the village across the river.
Well, I have only a small canoe.
And if I'm not careful the lion will eat the goat and if I'm not careful, the goat will
eat the banana.
And the key says, figure it out.
So he figures out, anyway, he comes up with a formula as such.
He's going to take the goat across first.
And then come back for the banana, return with the banana, and then come back for the
goat, and then take the lion, after all the goat and the banana, the lion won't eat the
banana.
And then he'll come back for the goat, and that's what he does.
Now, as simple as that fairy tale may sounds, it says that, a fundamental function of every
society is the fact that the distribution of the scarce resources must be carefully
managed.
And every profession must be part of that health care included.
So how is it that we have a situation whereby there are drugs in the big hospitals, and
none, in the large ware-houses in the city like Nairobi, and none in the villages, in
the dispensaries, where there are MRIs, several kinds, and extra machines, but there are many
pregnant women or tuberculosis patients who have never seen an x-ray machine or an ultrasounds
in 2013.
Folks, I'm here to say, that, technology transfer is an order, absurd phenomenon.
That's insane.
And with that, the result is, the trust of many mothers with the modern health care system
is broken.
And that broken trust is worse than the broken trust of the mother expecting flowers on Mother's
Day.
And, with the advent of mobile technology, we stand to be remembered as the generation,
as the FaceBooking, tweeting generation that did nothing about it.
And I stood counted to one of those amongst many who did something about it.
That's why, on Oct. 11, 2011, I founded a company with a mission and a vision, to take
technology to the rural areas, where 80% of people get care.
When we presented our ideas and our projects to different funders and venture capitalist,
we were told, oh that idea's absurd.
We were left with only the words of Albert Einstein, that said, if at first, your idea
is not perceived as absurd, then there is no hope for it at all.
So we went to work and starting developing.
I'm glad to say, that we developed a technology that will work in a facility such as this.
And you can see the number of dispensaries that can be served.
The system is called ZIDI.
ZIDI is an enterprise management system, all cloud based, that allows us to track what
is happening in every clinic, and we can monitor drugs remotely.
And hopefully prevent the drugs from running out.
And, we now have Windows, Microsoft, helping us develop the Windows version -- we're partnering
with a Windows version.
And Yasset, helping us connect each facility by spot-beam, satellite technology.
The good news is that, two weeks ago, we got a call from the Ministry of Health that said
ZIDI would be the national e-health system in Kenya.
And, with this, each facility can be monitored for the drug supplies.
And a promise, is that if that is done, the shortage of drugs will be reduced.
And a mother, walking to a clinic, would have her drugs, and would be treated.
And if that happens, hopefully that mother would one day be able to stop, and smell the
roses.
To support our movement, #ZIDI#Meliora.
Thank you.