After a couple of days with the lovely Ian and Judy Goldman in Pretoria: early morning walks (Simon and Ian); intellectual discussions (Ian, Judy and Jane); discussions on World Music (Simon and Ian); exasperation with technology, especially Word (jane and Judy); etc etc, we have just arrived in Lusaka to a very warm welcome from Mark and Alison Pearson. Without ‘The Pearsons’ providing us with a base, transport, encouragement and WiFi(!) during our visits things would have been a lot more difficult.
Our meeting with UNICEF at 10:30 tomorrow was confirmed today which is brilliant. Our trip could not get off to a better start. We are also seeing one of our MSL contacts tomorrow and will have our first meeting with MTZL to talk in more detail about the mobile phone aspects of the pilot.
I have been totally exhausted today and that’s mostly down to the fact that I was up all night playing with Google’s new (to me) interface onto various public data sources. This is totally fascinating and disturbing at the same time. A stark reminder of why we are doing what we are doing. Have a play with the graph below: press the play button; drag the slider to see how life expectancy and child mortality has changed since 1960 in Zambia compared to the UK.
The size of the dots represent GDP – note how the UK has grown while Zambia hasn’t. Note also how life expectancy plummets from around 1990 – due to HIV/AIDS – and how the progress on child survival rates is so slow and in a different ball park from the child survival rates in the UK. Play it through a few times and drag the slider around to get the full picture.
What do you think?
RT @colalife: Child mortality and life expectancy as Google sees it . . . https://fb.me/LceiBzAN