Medic Mobile works with the simplest of cell phones to help provide health care to those far away from their nearest hospital. Photo: Fabiola Coupet/Mercy Corps.

In rural communities around the world, the virtual doctor is in.

The distance between far-flung communities and their nearest hospitals can be fatal. Medic Mobile bridges the gap using a common household item: the cell phone. It’s not the same as a living, breathing doctor, but Medic Mobile comes pretty close, and it does so using a list of platforms that is strikingly similar to what you might find on a smart phone. These seemingly-sophisticated technologies can work on even the most basic of cell phones and computers, just like those found all over the developing world.

Medic Mobile’s Sim Apps, in addition to open-source platforms like FrontlineSMS, OpenMRS, Ushahidi, Google Apps, and HealthMap, allow hospital staff sitting at a computer to communicate with multiple health workers in rural areas. The health workers’ phones are basic, but Medic Mobile uses a tiny parallel SIM card that fits between any GSM phone and a carrier’s cell phone to allow these phones to run the necessary apps. The Medic Mobile website provides a more in-depth description of the many technologies it employs. In a 2009 interview with GOOD magazine, co-founder Lucky Gunasekara described Medic Mobile’s importance:

We can communicate need in real time. Say I am a community health worker in rural Malawi and one of my patients gets really sick. Before this system came along, for a lot of clinics, the patient would die, because even though I have some basic health training as a community health worker, there is nothing I can really do. They're still just as disconnected as the communities they live in. Now with our system clinicians see things in real time and they communicate back.

In addition to saving lives, the program saves time: its website says that in six months, the pilot program in Malawi “saved hospital staff 1200 hours of follow-up time and over $3,000 in motorbike fuel” and cut 900 hours of travel time for antiretroviral therapy monitors by eliminating their need to hand-deliver reports to the hospital.

Since its inception in 2009, Medic Mobile has expanded to Honduras, Haiti, Uganda, Mali, Kenya, South Africa, Cameroon, India and Bangladesh. The platform is adaptable to different situations: it was used in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake to link first responders and locals in need of help. As a result of its successes, Medic Mobile was recently named one of the Top 11 in 2011 mobile health innovators of the year by mHealth Alliance.

The proliferation of cell phones is sparking a revolution in developing-world health care. Innovators from all reaches of the globe have used the near-ubiquitous technology to increase health care affordability and access. By adapting sophisticated platforms to basic devices, they’re turning $15 cell phones into invaluable lifelines.

Editor’s note: For more information on the connection, check out A Medical Lab in the Palm of Your Hand, A Dose of Cell Phone Surveillance Helps Aid Workers Save Lives, and Paging Dr. Smartphone, to name a few.

Belu's eco-friendly, socially responsible bio-bottles. Photo: Courtesy of Belu

There are few things more satisfying than a cold drink of water. But for lots of people in the world, clean drinking water is hard to come by. A UK-based company called Belu is helping change this. Pronounced "blue," the nonprofit sells bottled water in their eco-friendly "bio-bottle," made from compostable corn plastic and capped with a PVC-free top.

For every bottle of water they sell, the folks at Belu provide one person in a developing country with clean water for a month:

In collaboration with Oxfam, WaterAid, and Fresh2O, Belu has thus far funded the installation of wells, hand pumps and rainwater harvesting technology in four countries: India, Mali, Bangladesh and Madagascar. These projects are rated to provide safe drinking water to over 43,264 people for at least fifteen years.

For a bottled water company, that's pretty refreshing.

Cotton farmers in western Africa have been badly affected by a global drop in prices. Photo: 10b travelling (flickr)

Falling cotton prices hurt African farmers far more than their American counterparts. And American subsidies may be to blame for the Africans' pain, according to a documentary on Dev.tv, a nonprofit media outlet.

American farmers profit by growing more cotton since the U.S. government has promised them a fixed price no matter how much they produce. But American subsidies cause the market to be flooded with cotton, according to an industry expert in Benin, Bernard Adikpeto. "Because the U.S. subsidizes its cotton production, its farmers put a surfeit of 1 million tonnes in the market in 2001, leading to a drop in cotton prices."

On the other hand, African farmers don't get any subsidies, so they are hit hard when cotton prices fall in the free market. Consequences are especially bad because this crop is a crucial source of income in countries of Central and West Africa. For example, the cotton industry in Burkina Faso employs more than 2 million people and generates 40 percent of the nation's export revenue. Nearly 40 percent of Chad's population is involved in producing cotton, and two-thirds of its total export comes from this crop. In all, more than 10 million African farmers have lost income since the price of cotton fell worldwide.

What's ironic is that African farmers are losing money while selling a product they produce more competitively than others. Central and West African countries produce cotton at half the cost of the U.S. and Europe. Yet, these African nations bear a loss of $1 billion in the cotton economy every year.

To learn more on this topic, you can watch the documentary below :

The Ivory Coast has come up with a new African-designed bus to combat its battered roads. Photo: Humanitarian and Development Partnership Team in the CAR (flickr)

Bad roads and battered, overcrowded buses are a common sight throughout West Africa. But a company in Ivory Coast has built the first buses it says are designed to accommodate Africa's needs. The new buses are said to be hardier and contain fewer seats in order to accommodate up to 100 people.

"This is an African design for Africa," said Sotra Industries director Mamadou Coulibaly in an interview with BBC News. Sotra’s new buses also will help consumers avoid buying expensive foreign vehicles that most Ivory Coast residents can't afford.

Sotra hopes that their new buses not only meet the needs of Ivorians, but also other West Africans. They plan to expand into the regional market by producing vehicles for Mali, Burkina Faso and Senegal.

These squares represent how much land would be needed to power the world, Europe or Germany with solar-thermal power. Photo: Treehugger

A single solar farm in the Sahara desert could provide clean electricity for all of Europe.

Scientists are investigating solar farms in the Sahara, as part of a $62 billion plan to provide all green power for a new, carbon-neutral European super-grid.

Because the sunlight in northern Africa is more intense, solar panels in the Sahara can capture up to three times more energy then panels located in northern Europe.

Arnulf Jaeger-Walden of the European commission’s Institute for Energy said today at the Euroscience Open Forum in Barcelona that a mere 0.3 percent of the light falling on the Sahara and Middle Eastern deserts would supply all the energy Europe needed.

The proposed solar farms will utilize advanced solar technology created by the California-based firm Ausra. These solar power plants use movable reflectors to concentrate sun light on pipes. The water in these pipes is solar-heated to produce high-pressure steam, which then goes through a turbine to generate electricity.

These innovative solar plants store enough hot water to make electricity even at night, and to increase production during peak demand periods. The plants are much more effective than traditional solar panel designs, allowing the plants to generate electricity at a mere 10 cents per kilowatt hour, much less than what the average consumer is paying now.

Ausra’s technology has been made cost-efficient by advances in transportation. Jaeger-Walden explained today that transporting the solar electricity would be relatively easy using new high-voltage direct current transmission (DC) lines instead of the alternating lines currently used. Energy loss using DC lines is very low, making the usual issue of transportation over long distances less of a problem.

Sixty-two million dollars for a project of this kind seems expensive — until you compare it with the more than $45 trillion in green-energy systems the world needs over the next 30 years to avoid global catastrophe, according to the International Energy Agency.

Doug Parr, Greenpeace UK's chief scientist, welcomed the project, saying:

"A large scale renewable energy grid is just the kind of innovation we need if we're going to beat climate change. Europe needs to become a zero-carbon society as soon as possible, and that will only happen with bold new ideas like this one. Tinkering with 20th-century technologies like coal and nuclear simply isn't going to get us there."

The Green Wall for the Sahara Initiative will plant a wall of trees to stop the spread of the Sahara. Photo: Dale Gillard (flickr)

Ever heard of the Great Green Wall?

Concerns about the rapid southern spread of the Sahara desert have prompted African nations to build a wall – out of trees.

The Sahara has been moving south at a rate of almost a square kilometer a year, consuming villages and wiping out agricultural lands.

Slowing the desertification has become a huge priority — and a huge community effort.

International aid groups are helping build community gardens, institute new irrigation techniques, and teach sustainable farming. Projects are especially successful in the areas of the Sahara, like northern Burkina Faso, where new farming techniques are taking advantage of increased rainfall due to climate change.

The biggest project to date is the Green Wall for the Sahara Initiative. The $3-million, two-year initial phase will plant a belt of trees 7,000-kilometers long and 15 kilometers wide, and was formally approved at the Community of the Sahel-Saharan States in Benin last month.

The African Union says future phases will plant trees from Mauritania to Djibouti in two parallel belts, creating a strip of protected topsoil for high-yield farming. Nigeria has launched its own complimentary Desert-to-Food Program.

The AU hopes the Green Wall Initiative will arrest soil degradation, reduce poverty, conserve biodiversity, and increase land productivity in more than 25 countries. Others hope the project will create millions of jobs, promote ecotourism, alleviate the food crisis, and even introduce new fishing and livestock-breeding industries.

Who would have thought a wall of trees could have such a big impact?

Social entrepreneur Steven Redgrave gained renown by winning gold medals in rowing in five consecutive Olympics from 1984 to 2000. After retiring from competition, Redgrave was knighted in 2001, launched a line of men’s leisurewear and started a charitable trust focusing on educational and social needs in the UK.

In 2005 he visited Africa, and was moved to action by the poverty he observed. With the help of a major British retailer, Redgrave relaunched his clothing line, FiveG (short for "Five Gold"), as a 100-percent fair-trade enterprise.

In this video diary, produced by Fairtrade Foundation, we follow Redgrave as he visits a rural farming community in Mali that produces cotton for his products.

Thanks to fair trade, not only do these rural farmers receive a higher wage, but their community as a whole benefits as well. The video explains how the community receives what is called a "social premium" that is used for community development projects, including a new health center and a primary school.

For an in-depth look at fair-trade cotton, check out this analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in our archives.