The company is teaming up with Sierra Leone's Open Government Initiative, Cambridge University's Africa's Voices project, Telecommunication firm Airtel, and Kenya's Echo Mobile for various efforts aimed at fighting the deadly disease.
IBM and the Open Government Initiative developed a system that lets people report Ebola-related issues and concerns via SMS or voice calls in place of Internet connection which is hard to come by in these areas affected.
"For us to tackle Ebola, it is crucial to maintain an open dialogue between the government and the people of Sierra Leone," Khadija Sesay, Director of the Open Government Initiative, said in a statement. "IBM has enhanced our work on citizen engagement through the use of innovative technology, and opened up an effective communication channel with the general public so that we can learn from their input and create actionable policies in the fight against Ebola."
IBM can then take that info and via the power of supercomputing and cloud-based analytics, identify emerging issues before they get out of hand. "As the SMS and voice data are location specific, IBM is able to create opinion-based heat-maps which correlate public sentiment to location information," IBM said.
More importantly, the technology has already highlighted regions with growing numbers of suspected Ebola cases, so officials know where supplies and other assistance is most needed.
Nigeria, meanwhile, has recently been declared free of the disease, and it now working with IBM to help support the country's preparedness for future outbreaks. With a technology donation from IBM, the Lagos State Government has opened an Ebola Operations Center, which coordinates disease containment efforts on behalf of the Nigerian government and other organizations.
Meanwhile, another Microsoft co-founder has pledged a nice chunk of change to help fight the outbreak. Paul Allen has set up tackleebola.com and committed to donate $100 million to the effort.
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