Grameen Foundation develops Mobile Technology for Community Health (MOTECH)

The Grameen Foundation was providing health care to pregnant women in Ghana in 2010 when the organization had an idea: As cellphones become more widely available in developing nations, health information can be quickly disseminated to poor patients in remote locations via voice and text messaging.

Three years later, the foundation’s thesis has given rise to an open-source software platform called Mobile Technology for Community Health, or MOTECH, that an increasing number of nonprofits, non-governmental organizations and humanitarian groups are using to address pandemics such as tuberculosis and HIV.

Like any large enterprise, nonprofits and other non-governmental organizations have seen their operations impacted by the rise of big data — the troves of digital information that can now be collected, stored and analyzed thanks to advances in computing.

... the Grameen Foundation has more recently expanded beyond just mobile health initiatives, developing a program called TaroWorks that allows any humanitarian organization to create customized surveys using technology from Salesforce.com and Google Android.