BackgroundMaintaining adequate supplies of anti-malarial medicines at the health facility level in rural sub-Saharan Africa is a major barrier to effective management of the disease. Lack of visibility of anti-malarial stock levels at the health facility level is an important contributor to this problem.MethodsA 21-week pilot study, 'SMS for Life', was undertaken during 2009-2010 in three districts of rural Tanzania, involving 129 health facilities. Undertaken through a collaborative partnership of public and private institutions, SMS for Life used mobile telephones, SMS messages and electronic mapping technology to facilitate provision of comprehensive and accurate stock counts from all health facilities to each district management team on a weekly basis. The system covered stocks of the four different dosage packs of artemether-lumefantrine (AL) and quinine injectable.ResultsStock count data was provided in 95% of cases, on average. A high response rate (≥ 93%) was maintained throughout the pilot. The error rate for composition of SMS responses averaged 7.5% throughout the study; almost all errors were corrected and messages re-sent. Data accuracy, based on surveillance visits to health facilities, was 94%. District stock reports were accessed on average once a day. The proportion of health facilities with no stock of one or more anti-malarial medicine (i.e. any of the four dosages of AL or quinine injectable) fell from 78% at week 1 to 26% at week 21. In Lindi Rural district, stock-outs were eliminated by week 8 with virtually no stock-outs thereafter. During the study, AL stocks increased by 64% and quinine stock increased 36% across the three districts.ConclusionsThe SMS for Life pilot provided visibility of anti-malarial stock levels to support more efficient stock management using simple and widely available SMS technology, via a public-private partnership model that worked highly effectively. The SMS for Life system has the potential to alleviate restricted availability of anti-malarial drugs or other medicines in rural or under-resourced areas.

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This article analyses performance of the land market in several irregular settlements (colonias) outside Rio Grande City, Starr County, Texas. Specifically, it explores the impact upon land prices of a major title 'regularisation' initiative to clear property titles of very poor households undertaken by the Community Resources Group (CRG) Receivership Program at the behest of the Texas State government between 1995 and 2002. Land price data and trends are analysed using a major CRG database of over 1400 price records and files, complemented by a questionnaire survey of over 260 households applied by the research team as part of an evaluation of the CRG Program. The data show that prices are relatively 'flat' in real terms over time and that, while there was a spike in prices during the early 1990s, there does not appear to have been any significant increase since regularisation. The data suggest that prices appear to be shaped more by socially determined criteria associated with the developers themselves, rather than by settlement characteristics, location, etc. Regularisation of land title appears to make little difference to land market performance and, while colonias are a vehicle for investment for low-income groups, the rate of return compared with other segments of the (formal) property market is very low. These findings are compared with similar work for less developed countries and also challenge those theories that argue in favour of land regularisation as a means to improve land market performance and integration of the urban poor.