Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 24 April 2013

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade

Overseas Development Issues: Discussion with Centre for Global Development and GOAL

3:10 pm

Mr. Simon Woodworth:

The health surveillance attendants are the target group. They are part of a government training programme which was started under the previous Mutharika government and now the Banda government has taken it over. They are being trained in some primary care in rural areas. We want those people to have the phones. We have had some good industrial contacts in Malawi with a couple of companies who have come up with some very clever incentivisation programmes to get people to use the phones, to maintain them and not lose them. They give incentives such as free credit every month. We are not sure of the appropriateness of some of those incentives as yet. However, as we work through the project - we are about 18 months away from carrying out the pre-trial study in Malawi - we are pretty confident we will have most of this worked out.