Daily Times

Sehat Kahani has partnered with Huawei, the Universal Services Fund, the Ministry of IT and ITU to create the very first smart village in Pakistan. Situated in Gokina, a tiny hamlet in the Margalla Hills near the Capitol.

The project comes under the umbrella of Smart Village Pakistan, a nationwide initiative launched by the Pakistan government in 2021 and funded and technically supported by the International Telecommunication Union and Huawei Technologies Pakistan. The initial scope of the project is to establish one Smart Village each at Islamabad, Punjab, Balochistan, Sindh, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and Gilgit-Baltistan.

In Gokina, and in future smart villages, Huawei provides cutting edge technical solutions to connect the unconnected. The Huawei Rural Star rural connectivity solution will be a pivotal in smart village connectivity along with Fixed Wireless Access for last mile connectivity of users with 4G networks. In each village, multiple technological solutions will be implemented to meet the needs of connectivity and digital services.

This is a key step in realising the vision of Sehat Kahani which is to enable healthcare access for the vast majority of Pakistanis who were unable to access healthcare (especially the most marginalized) and to enable Physicians especially Female physicians the opportunity to maximize their medical practice or resume it if they were unable to, previously due to social, cultural and economic challenges.

Dr. Sara Saeed Khurram and I cofounded Sehat Kahani as female physicians who understood challenges faced by female doctors in our country who would often drop-out from practicing medicine.

The numbers are telling, Pakistan is the 5th largest country in terms of population but we only have 0.5 doctors for 1000 patients; a gap created by a vast majority of female doctors who never work and other physicians who leave Pakistan for better work opportunities.

Sehat Kahani began work in early 2017 by initially creating nurse assisted telemedicine centers, called e-health centers. In 2020, we also created a mobile app which has a corporate and consumer segment. Today we are present all across Pakistan in the form of 59 e-health centers with the support of leading partners such as WHO, Grand Challenges Canada, USAID, ITU, Huawei, USF, to name a few. The consumer app has over 1.4 million users and the corporate app which is being used in 650+ companies in companies such as HBL, Meezan, through our key partners Jubilee, Adamjee and Pak Qatar. Collectively we have been successful in doing 2 million consultations till date.

Despite this resounding success, until the Gokina Smart Village we were still only reaching the populations that had access to electricity and internet connectivity. A community which was so remote that people did not have access to quality health. We established an E – Health center in this village which has catered to over 500 patients in a time span of 3 months only.

This sort of integrated and holistic approach to providing access to essential services to rural communities digitally is critical step in sustainable and equitable development. The scale and outreach required in Pakistan can only be achieved through strategic partnerships with health and education practitioners working with technology leaders. Huawei, in particular, brings global best practices to the table as we incorporate learnings from similar projects across world into the Smart Villages Project in Pakistan.

Gokina is just the beginning and we are hopeful that with these esteemed partners we will scale up smart villages in other remote and vulnerable populations as well giving them access to quality healthcare, education, access to financial services and be able to bring quality into the lives of the village dwellers.

The author is the co-founder and COO of Sehat Kahani, a one-stop telemedicine solution for various health care primary health issues from diagnosis to treatment. Sehat Kahani is Pakistan’s leading Digital HealthCare Platform democratizing health care access for all.