Harnessing information technology to improve women’s health information: evidence from Pakistan

BMC Women's Health

Research Article

Florian Fischer¹  Shazia Qureshi²  Rubeena Zakar³  Muhammad Z Zakar³ 

[1] Department of Public Health Medicine, School of Public Health, Bielefeld University, P.O. Box 100 131, 33501, Bielefeld, Germany;Faculty of Law, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan;Institute of Social and Cultural Studies, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan;

关键词: Health information;    Information communication;    Women’s health;    Pakistan;    Rural women;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1472-6874-14-105

 received in 2014-01-03, accepted in 2014-09-02,  发布年份 2014

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundMore than half of Pakistani women are illiterate, marginalized, and experience myriad health problems. These women are also disadvantaged in terms of their restricted mobility and limited access to public space. Nonetheless, user-friendly information and communication technologies (ICTs) have opened up new opportunities to provide them with information that is essential for their health and well-being.MethodsWe established an Information and Communication Centre (ICC) in a village in Sialkot (Pakistan) on a pilot basis in 2009. The basic philosophy of the ICC was to provide women with health-related information by exposing them to modern sources of information on their doorstep. By design, the ICC was a community-based and community-managed institution where women could access information through online (e.g., internet, mobile phone etc.) and offline (e.g., CDs, TV etc.) resources. The ICC was managed by a group of local volunteer women who had the capacity and skills to use the devices and tools of modern ICTs.ResultsWe noted an overwhelming participation and interest from local women in the activities of the ICC. The women wanted to receive information on a wide range of issues, from family planning, antenatal care, and childcare to garbage disposal and prevention of domestic violence. Overall, the ICC was successful in initiating a meaningful “information dialogue” at community level, where much-needed information was retrieved, negotiated, mediated, and disseminated through intimate and trusted relations.ConclusionWe conclude that ICTs have the capacity to cross the barriers of illiteracy and can reach out to disadvantaged women living under a conservative patriarchal regime.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Zakar et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.