“In just six years, DKT Ethiopia has transformed its system for tracking contraceptive sales from pins and pencils to computers and satellites and, in the process, helped create a family planning and HIV prevention success story in the Horn of Africa,†David Olson, a global development communications consultant, writes in the Huffington Post’s “Global Motherhood†blog. Noting DKT Ethiopia is an affiliate of DKT International, Olson describes how a Geographic Information System (GIS) has helped the organization “display and analyze sales, finance and inventory information geographically and, particularly, to plot every one of its 30,000+ direct and indirect sales outlets.†He adds, GIS helps DKT in making “a [significant] contribution to Ethiopia’s family planning and HIV prevention efforts is by keeping a close watch on its sales performance and tweaking its efforts, where necessary, to maximize performance.†Olson notes DKT currently is studying “the efficiency, feasibility, cost-effectiveness and sustainability of equipping its sales team with smart phones to allow them to enter information on new sales outlets directly into the system, eliminating a huge amount of work for headquarters staff†(4/24).
This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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