In Mwanza, Tanzania, as in many local governments, health sector workers and environmental monitoring professionals rarely spoke to each other. They gathered data points, and their surveys accumulated in piles in different offices. But when mWater, an organization that develops technology for water and health, collected those surveys together in an open access database, the technology became common ground now that data was gathered, analyzed, and acted upon from one place.
The husband and wife team who founded mWater entered graduate school the year development economist Jeff Sachs published “The End of Poverty.” They were drawn to his argument that malaria was one of global health’s low hanging fruit.
“Sadly, 12 years later, malaria has not been solved,” co-founder Annie Feighery told Devex following her appearance at SwitchPoint in Saxapahaw, North Carolina, last week.