In the dark days of October 2014 an unprecedented Ebola epidemic wrecked havoc across Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. In Sierra Leone, the health system was only weeks away from total collapse due to an inability to manage or pay health workers across the country and the world braced for the unchecked spread of the disease throughout west Africa. In the face of apocalyptic scenario, a company made up of local hackers took on the unprecedented challenge of building, implementing and running a huge Management Information System and Mobile payments system to keep the health system from collapsing. This talk will show how this was achieved with Open Source Software, second hand laptops, hacked voter registration machines, second hand smartphones and some very smart and determined young people used to achieving great things with none of the resources we take for granted. We salute them.

Salton Arthur Massally, Harold Valentine Mac-Saidu, Francis Banguara, Emerson