Driving Data for Health Care in The Gambia

At Ford, we're helping researchers and programmers better understand how cars, bikes and other modes of transportation can work together to create new mobility solutions that can help make people’s lives better, including ensuring that vital health care reaches communities that urgently need it.

In rural areas of The Gambia, a remote West African country surrounded by Senegal, people depend on Riders for Health to deliver the medical services they desperately need. Riders for Health is an award-winning, not-for-profit nongovernmental organization that manages a fleet of more than 1,700 vehicles, used exclusively for health care and other public services. The organization focuses its efforts in places where no widespread network of vehicle-maintenance facilities exist — including Liberia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Kenya and Malawi. To date, Riders for Health has provided health care access to approximately 21.5 million people.

Before Riders for Health arrived in The Gambia, most women and children had little or no access to vaccines, medications or life-saving hospital care. And, with only a handful of health care professionals available, many lives were lost, primarily because of lack of access to basic transportation. The country also has limited infrastructure and an intense rainy season that results in the dirt roads being completely washed away. In many places the roads are so disintegrated that even The Gambian government is uncertain where they are. These conditions pose significant challenges for Riders for Health. To take on these challenges and better serve The Gambian people, the organization turned to Ford for ways to improve how they operate their vehicles.

After learning more than half of the group’s service vehicles are motorcycles, we decided to create a new sensor kit, Info Cycle, based on the Ford OpenXC™ data platform. These kits were designed to collect data such as wheel speed, acceleration and altitude from everyday commuter bicycles to provide insight into how alternate modes of transportation might best serve future urban mobility needs. We repurposed the Info Cycle technology and tweaked the devices design to fit the motorcycles – ultimately up-fitting 50 of their motorcycles with the new sensor kits. These kits collect the type of GPS data and mapping coordinates that now enable Riders for Health to provide smarter and more efficient medical services.