|  | Excerpt from: Globally AWhere
| | | September 05, 2008 | | A real time communications tool will revolutionize the fundamental approach of international aid. | The UN Foundation is in the early phases of a ground-breaking partnership with AWhere. Kevin Starace, United Nations Foundation (UNF) Senior Malaria Advisor, spoke to AWhere at length this week about the project.
 AWhere: Tell us about what you're working on, and what your goals were when you started this project.
 Kevin Starace: As chair of the Roll Back Malaria (RBM) Performance Subcommittee we’re mandated to help the sector improve effectiveness. Starting in 2007, we’ve been trying to find a technology that enables several things:
- This one is the most important: we've got to break down silos across all boundaries, sectors and specialities, including but not limited to funding, institutional knowledge and to create a sector-wide peer review process.
- Performance evaluation – how are we, collectively, achieving these huge global targets? Specifically, those in alignment with the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDG), including an 85% distribution of bed nets and reduction of child mortality.
- Provide platform by which all health initiatives can input information that is relevant to scientific advancement, investment evaluation, and providing a complete picture of what's going on at the ground level.
After I first talked to [AWhere CEO] John Corbett, I realized that the common denominator for all of those problems is location. What matters is not our organizational and bureaucratic divisions, but what's happening to the people on the ground. If we organize information sharing around the location of the problem, it helps us create a new collaborative holistic vantage point.
 AWhere: Tell me more about what you mean when you say ‘the impact of location as a common denominator.’
Starace: Let's use an analogy from another issue UNF works on. The progress on elimination of polio and measles both well ahead of where we’re at with malaria. They have made huge strides over last 15 years in distributing immunizations to mothers and kids. And they realized how much work (and LOTS and LOTS of money) it took to mobilize these families, get them out of their villages and homes and into the health centers. Now that these people are here, how else can we help them? Of course, the list is endless, and includes access to vitamins, clean water, healthy food, bed nets. These poor people face so many issues. This concept of integration broke down silos, each institution has its own funding, specialists, bureaucracies, knowledge-bases and more.
AWhere: So, how do you do this now?
Starace: We don't know how many people die from malaria. We have to guesstimate both deaths and infections. We can't identify the majority of people who die within their village, don't go to the hospital, don't have a birth certificate. In some cases, all the people who die in a rainy season are categorized as malaria deaths. The WHO has to report that between one and three million people die every year, That's amazing. We’re all committed to do better.
And that's what inspired this. We must enable program administrators to improve their investment, and begin to integrate the programs to let scientists look at all the available data to make better decisions. And with John's collaboration, we’re seeing how this is so much about the location-relevant information, which is the only way to cut cross the silos. Regardless of whether it's climate, agriculture, corruption or health – focusing on the target population is where we should start any project.
AWhere: How is this going to work?
Starace: Well, each program administrator (they're the people who control the money) is responsible to their governments, tax payers, philanthropists and other stakeholders. It's our job to help them look 10 years out and be more responsible to the big picture.
One of the interesting things about public health is that each issue is bound by a collective governance system – called a public health partnership – which helps efforts stay connected. In malaria it's Roll Back Malaria (RBM). In AIDS, it's UNAIDS. At the same time, no one can tell each of us (Gates Foundation, US Government, UNF, etc) how to spend their money.
So we need a partnership of partnerships that collaborates and becomes more efficient and efficient. The only way to do this is through open source and transparent communication; by presenting information to a wide range of people in an open-source format.
 AWhere: What do you mean by open- source format?
Starace: Remember that I'm not a computer scientist, so I'm probably using the term wrong in that perspective, but I mean that all info is available to your colleagues, able to be supplemented, critiqued, questioned, and deliberated through a common platform. Always in peer review.
And we know just how much info it's going to be, so we need to provide an open platform where information can be simultaneously visualized, compared and reviewed in depth. Static maps or graphs won't do it, the whole thing needs to be integrated. Much of the data in is different formats, with different primary goals. These are big problems, and until we found AWhere, they were the problems that got in the way of accomplishing our goals.
Just the existence of this system creates incentive to release better info, because there's more visibility into what's available. It strengthens transparency and accountability, which are key to our collective success.
AWhere: You mentioned data visualization, could you talk more about your perspective on why that's important?
Starace: Let me share a recent discussion I had with our friends at the Global Fund, which is a primary financier of malaria, via direct aid to countries, accounting for more than 70% of all funding. When I showed them a prototype of the web-based tool that AWhere is building, their first comment was, “This is really exciting to us. It makes info more interesting to people which makes people think about it. We want people to pay more attention, and this can make it more entertaining.” So simple, so important.
Read Part II -- Command centers, data collection and the value for local health workers, plus how the future will roll out.
About the United Nations Foundation (UNF)
As the UNF Senior Malaria Advisor, Kevin Starace, works not only within the UNF, but across the global network of malaria researchers that span the United States Agency For International Development (USAID), United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID), United Nations' World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, Global Fund, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, malaria endemic countries, NGO’s and academia under the Roll Back Malaria Partnership and campaign to end malaria In short, he's at the hub of the information connection and collaboration of the world's effort to eradicate malaria.
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