The paper will review the impact of information technology (IT) on the access to health information in Sub-Saharan Africa. It will be comprised of four sections:
Level of health information in Sub-Saharan Africa prior to the IT revolution
• Technological developments that have impacted on health information delivery and how they apply to developing countries
• Current projects that facilitate access to health information in Sub-Saharan Africa
• Review of progress, lessons learned and ways forward
The ‘level of health information’ section will review the general status of health information centers within Sub-Saharan Africa during the print format era. The section will summarize how, by the mid-1990s, the Sub-Saharan African health information centers became archives of dated material with little current information. The ‘technological developments’ section will include a brief summary of the IT revolution and its impact on the accessibility of information - from CDROM to the Internet – email and WWW. It will detail the slow but steady growth of Internet access in Sub-Saharan Africa and will assess the current level of access and the implications for the delivery of health information. In the ‘current projects that facilitate access’ section, the paper will summarize specific projects that have positively impacted on the availability of health information in Sub-Saharan Africa during the past fifteen years. Predominantly non-governmental agency developed programs, these activities have utilized CDROM, email listservs, WWW gateways and fulltext Internet portals. The ‘review of progress’ section will summarize the activities of the ‘Access to Information for Health Professionals in Developing Countries: A global review of progress, lessons learned, and ways forward’ project. Initiated in April 2004, the ‘Global Review’ is evaluating the impact of IT in developing countries and is assessing what has and has not been successful and what will facilitate better resource utilization during the next ten years.