BATON ROUGE La.Victor Mbarika envisions Louisiana doctors serving the sick and needy in Africa without having to leave their American offices.
As director of Southern University’s new International Center for Information Technology and Development, Mbarika is setting up infrastructure in developing countries to provide greater health care access there through “telemedicine.”
Telemedicine allows doctors here to use patient photos and lists of symptoms sent online to make diagnoses and prescribe treatments through village nurses to patients on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, said Mbarika, a Cameroon native.
Information technology, or IT, is the equipment and expertise that links computer-based information systems.
Mbarika, a Southern e-business assistant professor specializing in information technology, said the deplorable health care situation in Africa is a nightmare.
“Coming from a developing nation myself, I feel obligated to contribute back,” he said.
The international center intends to impact much more than health care, he said, by helping to set up IT infrastructure and to spur business growth.
“You can’t run an e-business if the phone lines aren’t working well,” Mbarika said. “So we’re trying to set up more fiber optics and satellite Internet.”
It is very much part of the old “teach a person how to fish” adage, he said.
The business aid is more than just building a Web site, he said. It is developing continued Internet presence and controls from ordering raw materials to ensuring post-delivery customer satisfaction, Mbarika said.
When Mbarika came to Southern University in 2004, he and his students helped set up Web sites for small businesses such as barbershops near the university.
Now he is setting up technology infrastructure in poor African nations like Cameroon, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya and Eritrea.
Citing the many corrupt African governments, Mbarika said he is hopeful the growth of “e-democracy” in developing nations can put open political discussion and open political practices online for all to see.
“Government contracts can go online rather than under the table,” he said, “as is often the case.”
Mbarika has taken on two new postdoctoral researchers to join him and other collaborators in running the international center. The center started in June and is funded through the National Science Foundation.
Margaret Ambrose, interim Southern chancellor, said she is optimistic the center will help internationalize Southern’s academic curriculum.
“A number of new initiatives can grow like students and faculty exchange,” Ambrose said, noting the decline of international students at Southern since the 1990s.
“It’s very timely,” Ambrose continued, “and it’s really going to help underdeveloped countries.”
There may be a focus on developing African nations, Mbarika said, but Southern also is developing partnerships with nations in South America, Europe and Asia.
Some poor rural Louisiana areas are even less developed than much of Africa, Mbarika said, so the center also will work locally, starting with impoverished neighborhoods in Jackson and St. Francisville.
The center strongly emphasizes preparing his students for a global world constantly seeming smaller, and ever-advancing in technologies.
Mbarika is one of the lead professors for Southern’s new e-business master of business administration program. In that capacity, he is eager to break the mold of traditional teaching.
Mbarika is a major proponent of distance learning and in utilizing technologies such as video iPods to broadcast his lectures without students having to attend in classrooms.
“I think about 99 percent of most classes are boring,” Mbarika said, an attitude he knows makes some of his older colleagues bristle.
“A lot of professors don’t want to change the way they’ve been doing things for 30-40 years and it’s problematic,” he said.
In December, Mbarika graduated his first doctoral student, whom he physically met only three times. The student was in Sweden.
That student graduated with a doctorate of information technology with a focus in telemedicine.
– Associated Press
© Copyright 2005 by DiverseEducation.com
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