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The UN's Health Organization is Bridging the "Digital Divide" in Developing Countries with the Help of Project.net

The World Health Organization, the United Nations specialized agency for health, was established in 1948. WHO's objective, as set out in its Constitution, is the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health. "Health" is defined in WHO's Constitution as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

The Challenge

In 2000, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan launched a seven-year initiative through WHO, called the "Health InterNetwork." It aims to improve global public health by providing health professionals, researchers and policy makers in developing countries with access to high quality, relevant and timely health information, using the internet. The core components of the initiative are content, internet connectivity, and capacity.

WHO enlisted the aid of a group of experts and consultants based in the U.S., Britain, Belgium, France, India, Cuba, Uganda and Brazil to advise the Geneva-based implementation task force at WHO that is designing and building the Health Internetwork. WHO's challenge was to keep these worldwide project teams both productive and on track, while minimizing the expense and time associated with coordinating such a global effort.

All these systems had the same limitations: they were not scaleable for enterprise-wide use and could not handle the diverse project portfolios that were an everyday reality for the company. With offices in 100 countries, managers were handling large portfolios of very different projects involving both internal and external resources in numerous locations.

The Solution

WHO needed a scaleable, flexible and adaptable solution that could easily coordinate and support widely dispersed project teams. After reviewing a number of Internet-based project management tools, WHO chose Project.net and its project execution approach to global collaboration. Project.net's ease-of-use, technical support, scaleability and customization features were key factors in WHO's decision to Project.net becoming a collaborator in the Health InterNetwork Project.

Building something as complex as the Health InterNetwork requires the gathering, analysis and exchange of information. WHO's approach is to break down this task into manageable project components, invite relevant experts and consultants worldwide to participate, and create a Web-based "virtual forum" where participants can work together on particular tasks. Project.net facilitates broad participation of team members, at times and places convenient to them, and provides a comprehensive and systematic way to manage processes and documentation, as well as tools to track and archive completed work.

One of the major tasks WHO faced in creating the Health Internetwork was developing a framework for access to health-related content — defining not only the types of content to be made available, but also technical requirements for how the information is presented. This involved answering a number of difficult questions — What kinds of information are needed? What type of IT technology is required? How will it be used? What are the options for the information providers to tag this content so that it can be picked up by a search engine? What are the portal options to translate content that has not been translated at source, into local languages?

With so much information needed from so many places, managing logistics and facilitating collaboration are vitally important. Project.net, with its powerful tracking, document sharing and resource management tools, helped experts and WHO staff around the world work together and accomplish this complex task.

The Result

Using Project.net, WHO now works with health experts in more than 20 countries. Project.net's collaborative, Web-based structure gives people the opportunity to work together to make this important health initiative a better resource for the world's underserved populations.