Maximising Impact Through Collaboration
We firmly believe that collaboration is the key to success in tackling the complex challenges of society. By joining forces with other NGOs, we can leverage our strengths and amplify our impact.
Arogya World’s mDiabetes, is a low-cost, innovative and highly effective diabetes awareness and prevention program that aims to educate individuals about the importance of prevention and lifestyle change. By partnering with us, you will have the opportunity to bring this vital knowledge to your community, empowering individuals to take control of their health and well-being. We invite you to be a part of this collaborative effort to create a healthier future in your communities.
Our experiments in the past 2 years, along with approaches of other organisations in building digital health solutions, suggest leveraging WA as a great approach to Noncommunicable Disease prevention. WA gives more interactive content, dynamic flow and personalised feedback to the user. Depending on the need of the demography they will be able to subscribe to either of these services.
What sets our program apart is its affordability and flexibility. We understand the financial constraints that NGOs often face, which is why we have designed a partnership model that at a highly subsidised rate. By joining forces, we can pool our resources and reach a wider audience, maximising the
impact of our collective efforts. Together, we can create lasting change and contribute to reducing the burden of diabetes in our communities.
Key Takeaways for Potential Partner NGOs
- Our mDiabetes, diabetes prevention program will be a value add for the communities you cater to, and can be blended with your existing program, or kept as a completely separate program.
- The 56 mDiabetes messages on healthy living and diabetes prevention, have been carefully curated and focuses on the simple yet vital aspects of Diet & Nutrition, Physical Activity, Lifestyle along with Medical Data. Moreover the content is available in 12 regional languages of India, and contextualised for ease of understanding of the individual, irrespective of ethnicity and cultural background.
- mDiabetes will primarily be a mobile phone based intervention, and will not hinder any community activities related to your programs
- Arogya World will undertake capacity building of designated staff from the partner NGO, on program implementation.
Moreover, program strategy, timelines & reporting will all be mutually discussed & agreed upon before implementation.
Please write to varun@arogyaworld.org if you are interested in partnering with us. We would be delighted to discuss the details further and explore how we can work together to make a significant difference.
About Arogya World
Arogya World is a global health non-profit organisation working to prevent non-communicable diseases (NCDs)—diabetes, heart disease, cancer and chronic lung diseases—through health education and lifestyle change. Through our programs and advocacy efforts, we help people around the world lead healthier lives.
Our doorstep preventive model aims to make prevention accessible to all. Arogya World’s commitment to addressing the NCD problem of India, is achieved through its programs such as mDiabetes and MyThali, targeting whole communities where people live, through Healthy Schools where we educate 11-14 year olds in schools about healthy living, and through Healthy Workplaces at work settings for improvement of health & wellness of employees.
Context: The NCD Crisis
Non-communicable diseases (NCDs), which include cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, and chronic lung disease, are one of the 21st century’s greatest health and development challenges. NCDs cause more than seven out of ten deaths today, six times as many deaths as HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria combined. India is a diabetes capital: 100 million people are formally diagnosed with diabetes, and 139 million have pre-diabetes, which is fully reversible, according to the recent ICMR-INDIAB study. Furthermore, 700,000 Indians died of diabetes, hyperglycemia, kidney disease or other complications of diabetes in 2020.
However, it is well known that NCDs can be mitigated by adopting healthier behaviours. According to WHO, 80% of heart disease, 80% of
diabetes and 40% of cancers are preventable with three lifestyle changes: avoid tobacco, eat healthy foods and increase physical activity.
Rooted in this premise, mDiabetes program is Arogya’s ambitious effort to use mobile phones to educate millions in India on diabetes prevention through healthy living.
What is mDiabetes?
mDiabetes was designed as a population-level nationwide public health intervention using mobile technology to establish health behaviours known to prevent diabetes.
Our flagship effort in 2011 – 2013 was done with Nokia for 1,052,633 Indians. With this groundbreaking effort, we sent 56 text messages to more than one million people about diabetes and its prevention in 12 languages, twice a week for 6 months (total # messages = 56 million+) and tested the program’s effectiveness in bringing about behaviour change known to prevent diabetes.
The study which was published with Northwestern University and other top researchers, in the Journal of Medical and Internet Research in 2016, showed an impact of more than 20 percent improvement in multiple health behaviours, as a result of receiving our texts about diabetes prevention.
Since then, we have worked with stalwarts in healthcare such as Google, Aravind Eye Hospitals, Tamil Nadu, LVPEI, Telangana, Lions Club and Ambuja Cement Foundation, to promote healthy living to prevent diabetes.
This Blog is written by Varun Ramesan, Arogya World. For questions, reach out to him at varun@arogyaworld.org
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