One must consider all the costs of a system.

With Rapid SMS every time it is set up in a country several programmers and technicians must be involved. That means the cost, including their travel and salaries and per diems, is actually very, very high: hundreds of thousands of dollars. In addition, RapidSMS requires the organization using it to run their own web server -- something that is also quite difficult and expensive to do, and which in the African context probably costs an additional $50000 per year to operate (including the space, the air conditioning, the software, the personnel).

The only way it can be considered "very cheap" is if you ignore all those costs.

EpiSurveyor is more like Yahoo Mail: you do not have to have your own server, or hire programmers, or fly consultants to your country to use Yahoo Mail. You just use it.

So with EpiSurveyor, you could set up a similar SMS data collection system in an hour or so, and pay only $5000 per year (SMS data entry is not part of the free version).

Joel



On Oct 12 2011, at 09:27, IYOBOSA Igbinovia wrote:

> In Nigeria, there has been a limited use of this system of sending information or something similar to it-what they call the 'Rapid SMS' method of sending information. It was used to capture maily stock balance of health commodities at all levels and the data so sent can be assessed online by anyone that is registered to the hosting site server.
>
> This method was piloted by some states during major programmes, especially the LLINs distribution and attempts were made to scale it up for to the routine system of LMIS for other health commodities after a series of trainings in 2010; but this has not been very successful.
>
> The major challenges faced is the many codes that need to be remembered for each commodity (each health commodity is given a uniform code in the country; and when there is a new commodity, the central will have to agree on a code and disseminate it), the rather complex protocol that should be followed (ie the other of tying the health facility, ward, state etc in your mobile phone) and inability of the relevant authorities to complete the cascading of the training.
>
> It is a reliable and cheap way of sending data and can become more popular if some or all of the bottlenecks I mentioned above can be addressed!
>
> Iyobosa Igbinovia
> Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN
>

posted 12 October 2011 by Joel Selanikio from email