The Gambia puts its health facilities on the map

Connectivity would also change what happens to patients such as Adama Camara, a nursing mother who relies on the clinic’s services for herself and her baby.

“When our details are written on a paper and transferred to a computer, that will be helpful and will provide evidence. But if you are given only the paper, without transferring that data into a computer, one may step out and get drenched in the rain, and on your return to the hospital you will not have any document to present. If this information were in a computer, we would not need to come with this file,” she says – an everyday illustration of how a single computer in a facility could change what patients experience.

Fatou Touray, a data entry clerk who handles a large volume of paperwork in her daily routine, expects digitalization to make a visible difference at her facility.

“We are going into the malaria season, and in the malaria season we used to record many patients. And each patient will come with a paper, and each of them should be recorded in the register. We have a lot of work to do, but when you have the electronic system, that will make the work easier for us,” she says.

Further east in the village of Kafuta, the community’s basic and secondary schools – which together serve approximately 1,165 children – stand next to the village health post. The proximity creates an opportunity for cost-effective and sustainable connectivity, yet these children have limited experience of what the internet could mean for their learning and their futures.

The appetite for digitalization runs from decision-makers to frontline workers, students, parents, children and young people, and the UNICEF Country Office in The Gambia has been working closely with the Government to meet it.

“Across health, education, protection, governance and community engagement, digital infrastructure is increasingly seen not as a luxury, but as essential to better, faster and more accountable services,” says Nafisa Binte Shafique, UNICEF Representative in The Gambia, after a recent mission with President Adama Barrow and the Minister of Health, Dr Ahmadou Lamin Samateh. Nafisa underlined the need for stronger primary health infrastructure closer to communities.