Diffusion

We believe that by diffusing education through informatics we can reduce poverty as manifested by malnutrition, infectious diseases, and lack of family planning. We reflect and respect all personal beliefs, culture, language, and socio-economic strata.

Program

The Diffusion program reduces the impact of malnutrition, infectious disease, and other deficits by connecting health educators with resource poor communities in North and South America, Africa, and Asia via accessible technology. Diffusion’s program meets four of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals in an effort to end poverty across the globe. In order to meet its goals, diffusion will develop a long-term plan to affect multiple generations.

Diffusion is developing a curriculum of health education video and audio segments on various topics tailored to the health education needs of specific communities These are created using local cultural icons and heritage, then distributed using technology that is easily accessible.

Diffusion’s program of curriculum is being designed using the FRESH (Focusing Resources on Effective School Health) framework, created in 2000 by WHO, UNESCO, UNICEF, and the World Bank. Diffusion’s pilot data has demonstrated that it will overcome the barriers of “going to scale” outlined in the WHO’s Skills for Health publication.

The Diffusion program will translate existing materials and tailor them for cultural competence, create new material as needed and distribute these materials to the communities in need.

Diffusion’s health curriculum will stream into the millions of homes, NGOs, and schools already equipped with computers, radios, and televisions. In some remote villages, the program will set up new communication systems. Once a communication network is set up within a village, it can serve as a resource for a number of situations, including dispersing information during an emergency, collecting information for early detection and response to community epidemics, training and communication for village-level volunteers and more.
 

Statistics

49% (4.294 million) of child deaths in 2010 occurred in five countries: India, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, and China.  The largest numbers of deaths were in the African region (4.199 million) and in the Southeast Asian region (2.390 million). According to a 2010 study by Black, et al.

The concentration of child deaths due to some specific causes, such as diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria, and AIDS, in a smaller set of countries is striking. This result is partly related to the large populations of children younger than 5 years in these countries, but some diseases are also concentrated because of epidemiological and social conditions.

Under-nutrition, including stunting, severe wasting, due to deficiencies of vitamin A and zinc, and sub-optimum breastfeeding, is not presented as a direct cause of death in these statistics, but has been found to be an underlying cause in a third of deaths in children younger than 5 years.

Through dispersing the informatics of health education, the Diffusion program enables the resource poor to lower the incidence and impacts of poverty in their communities.