Pésinet and Saint Louis Net

Country

Senegal

Region

Africa

Programme Summary

Pésinet and Saint Louis Net are social-development-focused organisations operating in Saint Louis, Senegal that share an intranet site as well as related infrastructure (e.g., basic telephone service). Pésinet is a non-profit organisation focused on preventative health care, and Saint Louis Net is a for-profit business that intends to offer a range of information technology (IT)-based services to the community. They are both entities of Afrique Initiatives, a Brussels-based company focused on investing in small business development in Africa.

Communication Strategies

Both of these components of Afrique Initiatives draw on the use of information and communication technology (ICT) to accomplish development aims in Senegal, such as fostering good health and addressing poverty. Though the focus is on technology, the strategy often involves community participation. For example:

In an effort to provide preventative healthcare to low-income children (birth to 5 years), Pésinet's telemedicine project monitors the weight of children and sends the information to a hospital database via an internet connection. The service is offered at low cost to families and aims to contribute to the reduction of the infant mortality rate in Saint Louis. The project also highlights the use of ICT to improve health services in an economically sustainable manner. Pésinet’s weighing agents hope to educate families on the benefits of prevention and to motivate mothers to seek medical care when a child looks ill.

Specifically, the service weighs children in their homes twice per week, using local trained members of the community, and then tracks and monitors changes in the children’s weight over an intranet with the help of private doctors. It also arranges for follow-up care by doctors when necessary for the children’s continued good health. Pésinet charges a nominal monthly fee, averaging less than 150 CFA (US $0.26) per child, for each child enrolled in the service; the fee also includes the cost of any necessary doctor’s visits. The fee provides some revenue, but the majority of the operating costs of the service, which currently reaches about 1,400 children in 8 districts of Saint Louis, are covered by Afrique Initiatives.

Through an intranet site, Saint Louis Net promotes 5 products in an effort to benefit the Saint Louis community through: job search services, classified ads for local goods and services, safety-related weather forecasts and marine information for the fishing community, and e-government services. The company delivers these services via a franchise network of telecentres drawn from 300 such facilities already operating throughout the city. Saint Louis Net has basic computer and internet services operating in its telecentre, franchise agreements in place with two additional telecentres, and a completed intranet site.

Development Issues

Economic Development, Health, Technology.

Key Points

”Pésinet’s model appears to be successful, but it is a non-profit enterprise that will require continued support, as it is not intended to be self-sustainable. Saint Louis Net and some of its proposed services or products could become sustainable, but it is not yet successfully delivering social benefits and faces a number of business challenges, including the difficulties of managing a joint venture when the operating partner has other, potentially distracting, business activities. For the two organisations to share IT infrastructure is a novel and possibly useful approach, but may only be viable when that infrastructure is provided by a third party, such as Afrique Initiatives in this case. The results in Senegal so far also reflect the difficulty of starting a successful enterprise when the initiative comes from an external source, rather than from local entrepreneurs.”