Pesinet's mission is to reduce sustainabily child mortality by facilitating access to existing healthcare systems through the design and deployment of community-based health services for mothers and their children.
Pesinet provides a prevention and early care system for children under 5 in Mali, a country where one child out of five does not reach this age. Once a week Pesinet agents visit children and collect medical data they enter into their mobile phones via a customized Java applet, and which are sent to a central server. Doctors of the local healthcare centers can access these data through a web interface, and when one of them detects a potentially ill child, he can call his mother in for an examination. First necessity medications for the most current pathologies are given to subscribers for half of their normal price.
Pesinet is a paying service designed to be financially viable. It costs 500 CFA francs per child per month. This fee allows to cover a great part of the operational costs (weighing agents wages, monthly fee reimbursed to the partnering centers, operating expenses, 50 % of the cost of the medication provided) when the project reaches 1,500 subscribers. However, this monthly fee does not exceed one day of salary which make it affordable even for the poor families.It costs the equivalent of a kilo of onions or tomatoes.
It is estimated that Pesinet can prevent 80% of mortality causes from benign diseases, hence a reduction of more than half of child mortality in the populations covered by the service. Moreover, because of its focus on prevention, Pesinet contributes to reducing the health spending on benign illnesses.