7-10 October 2020
Africa/Nairobi timezone

Developing an offline multilingual mobile app to improve public awareness about COVID-19 to limit its calamity impact

Not scheduled
15m
Abstract for Research Paper

Speaker

Mrs Genet Shanko Genet Shanko Dekebo (Adama Science and Technology University )

Description

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 2020 report Coronavirus COVID-19 is a pandemic infectious disease caused by a newly discovered SARS-CoV-2 virus; and very quickly spread throughout the world. The challenge is delivering up-to-date information to the rural population of Ethiopia and Health Extension Workers (HEW) where the mainstream media like TV and radio are not their main source of information.
Different efforts have been made so far by the government of Ethiopia and different societies to create awareness via Ethic-Telecom, TV, FM radios and social Medias. However, the problem mainly still arises in the context that 1) the means of communication in mainstream media is limited reachability, and linguistically are in question in Ethiopian context. 2) Difficulty in conducting training and awareness creation campaigns to produce more professional’s, trainers and informers to reach out to the general public across the country. 3) Unable to reach all the citizens in the countries by mainstream Medias due to lack of proper access and limited coverage especially in rural areas. 4) Providing question and answer queries to healthcare professionals and the general public is not in place yet. So it is vitally important to design systems that can go so far and quicker to reach out to the rural and urban community through advanced technology like mobile apps with multiple language setup.
Therefore, a multilingual mobile based application is proposed to create better awareness about the virus and its transmission mechanism to improve public awareness about COVID-19 to limit its calamity impact in the population. The main goal of this project is to design, develop and implement a multilingual mobile application that can work on three languages (English, Amharic and Afan Oromo) for the first version of the app.

Primary author

Mrs Genet Shanko Genet Shanko Dekebo (Adama Science and Technology University )

Presentation Materials

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