Musu, a community health worker in Liberia, lives in a village that is four hours from the nearest clinic. After Musu finished high school, she returned to her community to find children were dying from diseases, including malaria and pneumonia. Musu became determined to help her community and so — with the help of Last Mile Health — she became a community health worker, armed with point of care diagnostic tests, a backpack full of medicines, a smartphone, and — importantly — a wage.

Raj Panjabi, the founder of Last Mile Health, has joined Chuck Slaughter, the founder of Living Goods, a nonprofit organization that has built a distribution platform for lifesaving products, for an announcement on Wednesday at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting.

A coalition of partners from philanthropy and business are committing $50 million to support these two social entrepreneurs to deploy 50,000 community health workers to provide digitally enabled, door-to-door care to 34 million people.

Additionally, Panjabi is building the Community Health Academy, a mobile platform providing video and audio instruction to community health workers around the world, so community health care workers do not have to travel hours for training sessions.

Each of the community workers in the new scheme gets an Android phone with an app that automates the diagnoses of three of the deadliest diseases in Africa: malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia. Then the app provides instructions on prescriptions, whether the patient should be referred, and it sends reminders and follow-ups.

Read the full article about how technology and philanthropy come together by Catherine Cheney at Devex.