The Millennium Villages Project (MVP) is an ambitious project helping rural African communities in 10 countries lift themselves out of extreme poverty through community-led development.

MVP is now testing and building on Open Mobile Consortium tools in its health-related programs. Because MVP is focused on establishing infrastructure in the communities it serves -- both in terms of technological and human capacity -- the project can serve as a test-bed for mobile applications that advance the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

According to Patricia Mechael, mHealth and Telemedicine Advisor with Millennium Villages, who is also a member of the Working Group of the OMC, "the open source community has been very active in developing mobile applications that are useful for us in training community health workers, working with patients, and monitoring things like malnutrition in children by collecting data on a phone."

Open source tools have no license fees and the code is available to anyone downloading the tools.  Using open source tools makes sense for developing countries where tools can be easily deployed in multiple countries and locations, and can be easily adapted to local needs.

MVP is using the mobile data collection platform JavaRosa in Uganda to register births and collect nutrition information. MVP is also currently piloting RapidSMS in Kenya, to support the "Community-Based Management of Acute Malnutrition" program in which text-messages are being used to both monitor, diagnose, and facilitate treatment of children with malnutrition.

Lastly, MVP is piloting CommCare, a mobile support tool for community health workers, in its field site in Tanzania. Community health workers are the frontline workers providing most health services in developing countries and have been the focus of MVP's work.

You can read more about the Open Mobile Consortium Technologies.

Mechael, in a recent interview, noted why the Open Mobile Consortium is so important for NGOs in the development field. She says that the OMC provides "a community where different organizations that need similar tools come together and jointly work towards platforms that interoperate or coordinate functionality so that redundant technology development is minimized." These tools are then available at no licensing cost to any organization to deploy for health and human development.

She also notes that MVP has already benefited from being in the consortium by leveraging existing OMC platforms to quickly customize those applications for specific uses for the MVP project. In turn, the team at MVP "tests the application in the field, and works with developers to improve the applications in real-life situations."

Because of the close relationship between implementers such as MVP and the technical teams of the Open Source Consortium, there is constant feedback and rapid iterations and testing of mobile applications, constantly improving open source mobile tools usable in the field for organizations today.