At midnight Valentine Uwingabire’s back began to hurt. Her husband ran to tell Germaine Uwera, a community health worker in their village in the fertile foothills of Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park.
Equipped with a mobile phone from the local health center, Uwera sent an urgent SMS text message and within a quarter of an hour, an ambulance had whisked Valentine to hospital. Minutes later Uwingabire’s third child was born.
“We called our child Manirakoze, which means ‘Thank God’,” she told reporters, sitting outside her mud and bamboo house pitched in the shadow of Karisimbi volcano, home to some of the world’s few remaining highland mountain gorillas.
Had it not been for Rwanda’s new Rapid SMS service, Valentine would have been carried in agony, down the hill to the nearest town on an improvised stretcher.
As is the case in much of Africa, fixed-line telephone networks are virtually non-existent outside of the capital and major cities.
