Global health is the practice of sharing ideas across borders in the pursuit of collaborating to improve health and health equity across the world. This field can oftentimes be confused with international health and public health, which is why it is important to analyze technologies and innovations with the five global health indicators to understand if a technology or innovation truly makes an impact in global health.
These global health indicators are the following:
- Geographical Location – The geographical location global health indicator focuses on technologies that focus on issues that directly or indirectly affect health but can transcend national boundaries.
- Level of Cooperation – The level of cooperation global health indicator focuses on technologies and innovations needing global cooperation for execution.
- Impact on Individual or Populations – The individuals or populations global health indicator focuses on the ability of a technology to impact health prevention in populations and the clinical care of patients.
- Access to Health – The access to health global health indicator focuses primarily on improving health equity among countries around the world.
- Range of Disciplines – The range of disciplines global health indicator focuses on a technology involving a wide variety of disciplines in and out of health sciences.
While there is immense value in understanding global health and the five key indicators that define this field, there is even more importance in evaluating the effectiveness in how effective technologies and innovations are. At the core, success for these technologies and innovations can be measured by adoption and application of these technologies that improves the health of communities.
Technology and innovations in the field of global health change lives every day. Unfortunately, developing a technology does not equate to people in an underdeveloped community adopting and truly using this new technology. Daniel Schnitzer, founder of EarthSpark International, states in his TED Talk, “Inventing is easy. The hard part is technology dissemination – the hard part is getting the products and technologies to the people who need it most.” (“Inventing is the easy part. Marketing takes work”). Innovations like the omniprocessor, Rice 360 technologies, or oral rehydration therapy would be meaningless if they were invented and left on the shelf in a research and development lab. The final and arguably most challenging and important step is the implementation of these technologies into communities that need them.
Successful adoption of a new technology relies on a variety of components across a community. A community member has to truly understand why they should optionally change their way of life and begin using this new technology; they have to understand “What’s In It For Me.” The lack of true adoption will turn into potential resentment of a new policy, cause confusion on how a technology works, and hinder the adoption of future technologies. Through trial and error, global health leaders have attempted to implement new technologies in underdeveloped communities.
An issue in the Journal of Economic Issues proposes an eight-component framework to expedite the scalability of a product or service and the growth of an organization in a new community (Warnecke and Houndonougbo). This framework is called the Social Enterprise Accelerator Model (SEAM) and consists of the following sequential components: clear vision and mission, exceptional leadership, core product or service, adequate funding, leveraged technology, cost-effective platforms, shared knowledge, and change attitudes and behaviors.
I will use SEAM to evaluate in Table 1 how Amy Smith and a team of MIT engineers developed and implemented the use of charcoal briquettes in Haitian communities that needed them most while overcoming cultural, political, and economic barriers.
In many underdeveloped communities, people ( mostly women) cook in small, unventilated rooms by burning energy sources such as wood that produce unclean byproducts like soot and smoke. This leads to potential health challenges such as respiratory distress for the people cooking consistently. Consistent build up of soot and smoke also deteriorate tools used for cooking and the room where cooking happens. Charcoal briquettes provide an accessible, natural, affordable, and cleaner way to produce energy. These energy sources typically look like manipulation of corn, rice straw, and sugar cane to develop these charcoal briquettes.
Table 1: SEAM Components
| SEAM Component | Action by Amy Smith and MIT disseminating charcoal briquettes |
| Clear vision and mission | Engineers are working to reduce the health impact and death of people from breathing in smoke from indoor cooking fires. This smoke leads to respiratory distress, the leading cause of death in children under 5. |
| Exceptional leadership | Amy Smith is an experienced and accomplished engineer and leader in the field of global health. She is the founding director of the MIT D-Lab, has completed global health field work in over 10 countries, and was even named as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people. |
| Core product or service | The core product is to produce an alternative cooking fuel (charcoal briquettes) that are affordable and accessible. |
| Adequate funding | MIT and supporting organizations provided initial funding. Once the briquettes were introduced and implemented, they became self-sustaining through being a simple technology made from waste that could then be sold, injecting financial assets back into the local economy. |
| Leveraged technology | Engineers designed compression devices to compress briquettes making them stronger and more effective than wood. |
| Cost-effective platform | Waste from the community (sugar cane, casava, rice straw, wheat straw, and others) is used to create the briquettes, making them an affordable energy source. These briquettes were then developed and sold in local markets, injecting assets into the economy. Charcoal briquettes created an economic surplus instead of a loss like so many other technologies. |
| Shared knowledge | Community leaders worked in collaboration with MIT engineers to develop briquettes, creating immediate buy in and knowledge transfer of this technology into the community. Community members shared their local experiences to help identify the best waste products to create the briquettes from. |
| Changed attitudes and behaviors | Charcoal briquettes became a part of daily life. They are developed by community members, sold in the local markets, and used in homes. This creates more jobs, a stronger economy, and healthier conditions in homes. |
The dissemination was effective at the core because of the active and intentional collaboration between MIT engineers and community leaders where charcoal briquettes were implemented. Through these strategies and actions, environmental challenges were overcome by using products that were already considered waste. The functionality of charcoal briquettes for end users is very similar to the functionality of traditional charcoal-like fuels, requiring no behavior change, significantly impacting the ability to overcome cultural challenges. Economic challenges were also overcome through briquette resources coming from community waste and the briquettes being integrated into the local economy.
Together, this has resulted in charcoal briquettes being a technology that is sustainable and has created lasting behavior change in communities. The Social Enterprise Accelerator Model is one of the best tools to grow a society-oriented organization and evaluate the effectiveness of an organization or technology to implement meaningful change in a community. SEAM creates the framework for designing and evaluating social-minded businesses of the future.
Warnecke, Tonia and Houndonougbo, Ahiteme N. “Let There Be Light: Social Enterprise, Solar Power, and Sustainable Development”, Journal of Economic Issues, vol. 1, no. 2 June 2016, doi 10.1080/00213624.2016.1176479
Erik Angus 