West-African based tech company, Code Innovation, with the help of a volunteer team from Chile, Lebanon, Kenya, Senegal and Gambia, have turned to an Israeli technology platform, Snapp, to create a free “About Ebola” mobile application to support public health outreach and communication efforts to educate the public about the Ebola virus.

The Snapp apps building technology is the brainchild of Vito Margiotta, Assaf Kindler and Gabriel Gurovich from the Singularity University. Snapp lets anyone with an idea produce a mobile app from any smartphone via its free platform. It took 11 days for the volunteers to build the informational Ebola app. The content for the app was adapted from information on the websites of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization. It was translated into African languages including Wolof, Jola and Swahili by a team of volunteers. The Code Innovation team says other African language translations will be included as they are crowd-sourced from the wider public. Moreover, the villagers who own the smartphones are regarded highly in their communities. “In almost all these villages there are at least one or two people with smartphones, and they are very highly regarded, both for their ability to access information from the outside world, and for their acumen in acquiring a device in the first place. So when they tell villagers that they should be doing a lot of washing with soap and water – one of the methods the app lists as a way to prevent Ebola – the villagers are likely to listen,” Kindler told Times of Israel. (via Israel21c)

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