Well, it's been some time since I've arrived in Nigeria, but I thought that it would be nice to devote a post to what led up to this whole endeavor before starting the main story.
So it all started about a year back when I got involved with organizing the Caltech African Health Symposium through Chess (a graduate student at Caltech). The African Health Symposium was how I came to know GEANCO, a foundation dedicated to developing and managing medical facilities in Nigeria. The foundation's main goal, especially, is to build a world-class hospital in Anambra, a region desperately in need of better health facilities.
Anyways, after the health symposium, as I came to know more about GEANCO, I thought it would be great if I had a chance to actually go to Nigeria and see how things were first-hand. (And hopefully also raise awareness of the African health situation upon coming back.) But I didn't see a feasible way this could happen until one of my housemates suggested I apply to the Housner Fund at Caltech. (The same fund had just given him a travel grant to go to the India/Nepal border region.)
The George W. Housner Student Discovery Fund awards travel grants for students to pursue independent study projects. To be frank, I hadn't really thought of a research topic I could pursue in Nigeria, so on the spur of the moment I thought maybe I could do a study on the use of educational technology in Nigerian medical institutions, partly influenced by an education survey that was being done at Caltech. After pitching the idea to Chess, he suggested that I might focus on the use of the Internet since it would be a valuable resource to medical students in Nigeria. As I was writing the proposal, I decided to shift the focus to what Chess had suggested, so in the end the topic became the use of information technology in Nigerian medical institutions.
In a nutshell, that's how this whole thing got started. The George W. Housner Fund came through for me and gave me $3100 to go to Nigeria, which I was very happy about. I'll post my Housner Proposal when I have the chance, so you can read about the project in a little bit more detail.
So it all started about a year back when I got involved with organizing the Caltech African Health Symposium through Chess (a graduate student at Caltech). The African Health Symposium was how I came to know GEANCO, a foundation dedicated to developing and managing medical facilities in Nigeria. The foundation's main goal, especially, is to build a world-class hospital in Anambra, a region desperately in need of better health facilities.
Anyways, after the health symposium, as I came to know more about GEANCO, I thought it would be great if I had a chance to actually go to Nigeria and see how things were first-hand. (And hopefully also raise awareness of the African health situation upon coming back.) But I didn't see a feasible way this could happen until one of my housemates suggested I apply to the Housner Fund at Caltech. (The same fund had just given him a travel grant to go to the India/Nepal border region.)
The George W. Housner Student Discovery Fund awards travel grants for students to pursue independent study projects. To be frank, I hadn't really thought of a research topic I could pursue in Nigeria, so on the spur of the moment I thought maybe I could do a study on the use of educational technology in Nigerian medical institutions, partly influenced by an education survey that was being done at Caltech. After pitching the idea to Chess, he suggested that I might focus on the use of the Internet since it would be a valuable resource to medical students in Nigeria. As I was writing the proposal, I decided to shift the focus to what Chess had suggested, so in the end the topic became the use of information technology in Nigerian medical institutions.
In a nutshell, that's how this whole thing got started. The George W. Housner Fund came through for me and gave me $3100 to go to Nigeria, which I was very happy about. I'll post my Housner Proposal when I have the chance, so you can read about the project in a little bit more detail.
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