Myshkin Ingawale: using mobiles to develop products for the bottom billion
Rachael Strecher on Myshkin Ingawale
Myshkin Ingawale approaches life with perpetual delight and curiosity. It’s what helped him invent a bloodless anemia test, and other tools to turn smartphones into mobile medical labs. Now, he’s turning his brainpower to facilitating the idea that people from the developing world should be authors of their own solutions. There is no better time than now, he says, when the internet provides a breeding ground for collaboration and innovation. For Myshkin, the next big thing is about connecting the right people so that they can come up with the next big thing themselves.
Myshkin Ingawale on Biosense
Myshkin Ingawale
Imagine if the next James Watson is growing up in a slum in Kibera, and the next Francis Crick is a rickshaw driver in Calcutta? Would they ever meet to collaborate and seed the next big thing in health since the Human Genome Project? Collaboration has been the recipe for the modern technological progress that has led to improvements in the quality of human life. Vaccines, air conditioners, automobiles, vacuum cleaners and of course, the modern marvels of mobile-based information and communication technologies, along with the world wide web, have all been possible due to some form of collaboration.
As well as being born out of collaboration, invention also needs the right mixture of capital, entrepreneurship and government support - or at the very least, lack of active suppression. But there are those who think that the way to make progress in the developing world is to give stuff away for free: free vaccines, free machines, free food, free band-aids. This policy has little or no precedent of resulting in strong, independent economies that can stand on their own feet. Did the US become what it is today by being the recipient of large doses of well-intentioned (or otherwise) foreign aid? Did western Europe? What has transformed both these places been, very simply, their human resources. People. People, who after finding other like-minded individuals, took it upon themselves to build the economic, social and political institutions that make the west what it is today.
Today we have an amazing tool for people to collaborate: the mobile web. Half the world can access almost all the information ever made available in the palm of their hand. More importantly, they can access each other. If the next Watson, growing up in a slum in Kibera was able to team up with Crick in Calcutta, they might have a fighting chance of inventing the next big thing. And this next big thing could be a simple or complex innovation that changes things for the poorest 3 billion in the world.
The people closest to global health or development problems – villagers in Africa, Asia or South America – cannot only generate ideas, but can also refine them with their peers, and self-fund (or crowdfund) based on what users actually find useful. These inventions could get into the mainstream as manufactured, distributed, serviced, reliable products and services – all led by the users that need them in the first place.
This is the thinking behind Biosense. Our products are developed by people who are closest to the problem – doctors with experience of serving patients in low resource settings, Asha workers (village-level, semi-skilled healthcare staff) as well as industrial designers. For example, uChek, a smartphone-based blood and urine testing platform, was developed based on insight that small diagnostic centers in remote parts of India often do not have the right onsite equipment to conduct diabetes tests. A group of developers, hardware engineers and doctors came up with the core idea.
In the future I hope the global north will no longer see developing countries as requiring aid in the traditional sense. I hope they’ll recognise that former aid recipients are the best authors of their own solutions. All they need is the right connection.
Myshkin Ingawale is the co-founder of Biosense. Follow @myshkinonline on Twitter.
Rachael Stretcher is the programme manager at the Aspen Institute’s New Voices Fellowship. Want to recommend someone for the Development Disruptors series? Send an email to globaldevpros@theguardian.com
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Solome Lemma on African philanthropy, the new drivers of development
Ned Breslin: thinking big about water supply
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