It’s an intimidating thing being in a classroom full of students each selected for their own ambitious aspirations to change the world in some way. Yet it was that very same environment that pushed us to take on a challenge, and brought us some seven months later, to a land 13,000 kilometres away.
Quinn (left) and Jillian (right)
Late last fall, spurred on by the support and encouragement we received in the Munk One program, we began to wonder if we could spend our summer conducting our own original research. We took an interest in Myanmar, a country in the process of emerging from decades of military dictatorship, and we began to read in depth about the country’s history and politics. We were fascinated by what we learned.
Myanmar has the second-worst health care system in the world (as ranked by the WHO), and has an extremely high rate of child malnutrition. Though much development in many sectors has occurred in the last few years, alarmingly little of it has been in health care. This contrasts strikingly with the boom in the telecommunications sector. In just a couple of years, there has been an explosion of mobile phone technology across the country, as the prices of SIM cards dropped from $1,500 USD under the military government to $1.50 USD with the arrival of competition from foreign telecom companies. As Myanmar emerges into the digital marketplace, they’re leapfrogging past the feature phone technology that dominates much of the developing world, and are going straight to smartphones.
World Health Organization, Myanmar
We wondered if this rapid expansion of mobile phone technology might be able to be leveraged to help address child malnutrition. Mobile phone-based health (mHealth) interventions have seen success in addressing malnutrition and other illnesses in many other countries. Often used as a diagnosis and treatment aid for health workers, as a data collection or follow-up tool, or as an education medium for the population, mobile phone-based interventions can be versatile and useful. We decided to research how mobile phone technology might best be used to address child malnutrition in Myanmar.
After a challenging but exciting few months juggling the writing of innumerable research proposals, applying for clearance from the Research Ethics Board, and pitching for funding, we received some exciting news – we had been selected for a U of T grant that would allow us to go and conduct field research in Myanmar!
When our plane touched down at the beginning of May, we hit the ground running. In our first week, we conducted several interviews with country directors of international NGOs, program officers at United Nations member organizations like UNICEF and the WHO, and even local community health workers (thankfully with the help of a translator)! Though it was overwhelming at first, we quickly adjusted and got into the swing of interviewing and arranging further meetings along the way with the help of contacts we established.
Looking back now, we realize that what we gained from these interviews was incredibly valuable. Not only were they a life-changing learning experience in terms of the skills we gained, but what we found really furthered our research. Though still in the early stages of data analysis, we believe we may have identified specific areas and ways in which mobile technology may prove an effective tool in battling the pandemic of child malnutrition in Myanmar.
Though access to food is often an issue causing malnutrition, an equally important concern is that most of the general population lacks nutritional knowledge or education. Certain cultural practices unique to Myanmar are not conducive to the general population maintaining their nutritional health. We believe that mobile phones, prevalent as they are in almost every area of the country, could greatly aid the process of reaching people in an effort to provide basic nutritional education. Best practices, including methods like “gamification”, are crucial to making something like this work. Additionally fascinating were our findings regarding the prevalence of the use of Facebook in Myanmar. The general population’s prolific use of Facebook brought us a startling realization: a significant majority of mobile phone users’ sole medium through which they accessed the internet was Facebook! Many aren’t aware of the existence of other apps, nor do they have the knowledge necessary to access them. This piece of information, though seemingly small, is absolutely critical to the success of any intervention using mobile technology in a Myanmar-specific context.
Though we spent a lot of time running from one NGO office to the next, we were fortunate enough to have time for our own exploration of Myanmar. Our research took us from the urban sprawl of Yangon with its round-the-clock hustle and bustle, to the quiet plains of Bagan, home to over two thousand ancient temples. We ventured further out to Mandalay, a city made famous by Rudyard Kipling, and Inle Lake, a serene body of water nestled amongst mountains. We were there during the monsoon season, and were on more than one occasion caught out in a torrential downpour. Myanmar, in its natural splendor not yet touched by the masses of tourists that will all too soon visit the lake shores and temple tops, gave us a glimpse into how a majority of the world’s population lives. In and amongst the cheery views of gold-clad temples and smiling Buddhist monks lay a more impactful scene: where villagers have to walk for days just to reach the nearest health clinic, where meals are few and far between, where one cannot drink unbottled water for fear of disease. The issues that we as Westerners long ago dismissed as reminiscent of another age are all too real in Myanmar.
We owe enormous gratitude to the Munk One program. It’s because of what we learned in class, both in technical skills such as writing research proposals and in being challenged to think outside the box, that we had the confidence and the ability to even begin a research project of this scale. Munk One gave us that drive to try things for ourselves, to venture out into the sprawl of a city far from home and begin a search for answers to a question that just months before we didn’t know needed answering. We could never have imagined that this would be possible after first year, but that’s part of the magic of the program: in some way you end up pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone, and it ends up being the one of the best experiences of your life.