The following story describes how the Community Health Information Centers (CHICs) we installed throughout Kenya in the early 2000s evolved within the first year from a simple library, offering health information, into a more integrated resource providing a learning center serving the needs of physicians, patients, students and ordinary community members.
Twenty years ago to the month, WiRED opened a Community Health Information Center (CHIC) in a small Kenyan village, called Butula. Most of our other CHICs were in larger towns and cities, but Butula was different, and it presented an opportunity for us to test the range of our novel concept to use computers to present science-based, medical and health information.
Early in January 2002, WiRED joined with two other NGOs (non-governmental organizations or non-profits) to launch an Internet access facility in León, Nicaragua. The joint venture brought computers to this town in Northwestern Nicaragua, often referred to as the liberal political and intellectual center of Nicaragua. At this point in the evolution of Internet technology, most people had heard of the Internet, but most had not seen a computer or accessed the Web.
With funding support from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, WiRED set up 24 Community Health Information Centers across Kenya. In addition to those public access facilities, we installed the first Medical Information Center (MIC) at the University of Nairobi School of Medicine, the country’s largest medical school. At a time when few people had their own computers and no one owned smartphones, this first-of-a-kind computer facility opened doors to research and study never before available to medical professors and students at the university.
As we have described in previous stories posted from our archive, WiRED worked in Iraq at the request of the U.S. Department of State. The following two stories, from June 2003, describe the opening of WiRED’s first Medical Information Center (MIC) in the largest teaching hospital in Baghdad: Medical City Center.
In the main headquarters lobby of the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., stands a wall bearing memorial plaques that honor fallen Americans who lost their lives while serving the American people abroad in foreign affairs. As of May 2021, there were 321 plaques with names going back to 1780.
Back in the early 2000s, WiRED’s Community Health Information Centers (CHICs) in Kenya were outfitted with desktop computers, CRT monitors (state of the art at the time) and an extensive collection of CD-ROMS stocked with health information. Initially, we offered information mostly about HIV/AIDS, which at the time was rampant throughout Africa and much of the world. It plagued men and women alike, and in countries throughout East Africa, it devastated entire villages, taking out large swaths of a community, leaving behind only the very young and the very old.
In 2001, WiRED received a developmental grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to determine if computers could deliver health information in low-resource Kenyan communities. While in the West we were slowly building computers into our daily routines, people in the needy countries we served had rarely seen one. NIH’s charge to WiRED was: Can computers teach people about HIV/AIDS and good health? Answering that became the focus of our early work in Kenya.
The room at the Al Kadhymia Teaching Hospital in Iraq had bars on the windows, lots of electrical outlets, and plenty of space to accommodate computers. I was traveling with an American computer technician and an Iraqi physician in May on a project sponsored by the U.S. Department of State to create medical-information centers at teaching hospitals and medical schools throughout the country. We were looking for places to install our equipment, and this room could have been the perfect spot.
From the moment Kenya gained independence in 1963, local and national leaders have envisioned a day when the country could finally eradicate poverty, ignorance, and disease. Leaders then and now realize that any real progress against any one of these three tightly interwoven challenges requires simultaneous progress in the other two areas as well.