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The Organization
International Institute for Communication and Development (IICD) is a non-profit foundation that specialises in information and communication technology (ICT) as a tool for development. IICD is active in Africa and Latin America where they bring about technical and social innovations that create and enhance development opportunities in education, governance, livelihoods, health and the environment. For maximum impact they work closely with partners from the public, private and non-profit sectors. Their aim is to help their local partners – teachers, farmers, health workers, local government officials and civil servants - to formulate and implement their own ICT-supported development policies and programmes.
The Challenge
What do hospitals in Tanzania, training institutions for young entrepreneurs in Ghana, and schools in Uganda have in common? One thing is the need to store information and share content, often in environments marked by constraints in staff technical capacities as well as constraints in stable supplies of electricity.
Sengerema District Hospital in Mwanza Region, Tanzania is one such institution. The hospital is integrating the use of ICTs to support its health activities. They are applying ICTs to strengthen their health management information, to enable telemedicine and continuous professional development for institutions that form part of the hospital, notably the School of Nursing and the School of Clinical Officers. Sharing healthrelated information between the different hospital institutions has been a challenge, and managing the technical infrastructure required for such initiatives has not been easy.
The Solution
Enter the Synology DiskStation technology. Various programmes supported by IICD have been building experience over the last year in using Synology’s network attached storage (NAS) solutions to support them in their work. Apart from the hospital in Sengerema and the Producer Enterprises Promotion Service Centre (PEPS-C) in Wa in Northern Ghana, other IICD partners such as Computers for Schools Uganda and the Nkozi Hospital in Uganda have also been using the Synology DiskStation DS209 solutions to manage local area networks and access content in an efficient and cost-effective manner.
Most take to the solution for its user-friendly administration tools and user interface, others for the opportunities it provides for minimising bandwidth usage while still being able to offer up-to-date data to the users of the network. Regardless of how it is being used - to provide information, to offer courses, to exchange information (e.g. between hospitals), to arrange for automatic updates via the internet, or to address connectivity problems – IICD partners using this solution tend to work in relatively isolated environments, since there is little other local expertise available on these solutions. In order to enable partners to use the solutions most effectively, IICD has brought together technical staff from the different partner organizations to share their experiences and enhance their skills to administer the Synology solution.
In the Sengerema District Hospital in Tanzania’s Mwanza Region, the Synology DiskStation is used to help share health-related information between the different hospital institutions. Before using the Synology technology, this was a challenge and managing the technical infrastructure required was not easy. Now, an administrator can more easily manage the infrastructure. He can, for instance, copy interesting health websites on the Synology DiskStation. Hospital staff can then access these websites locally, without having to connect to the internet. This significantly reduces bandwidth usage and costs. The Synology technology is also used to install third party applications such as Moodle.
*Extracted from IICD's website
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Read the original here:http://www.iicd.org/sectors/managing-and-sharing-content-for-development-the-synology-way