Microsoft and CARE partner to use technology to build healthier communities

While some Windows users may still have issues with Microsoft’s Windows 10 upgrade process for various reasons, the company is still sitting firm behind its intentions and in doing so, it’s helping a largely unspoken group of individuals.

Through Microsoft’s Upgrade Your World program, designed to encourage nonprofit organizations to help make a difference in their neighborhoods, the company is sourcing, discovering, and partnering with talent from around the world and contributing to the lives of millions.

Most recently, the Upgrade World Program joined forces with CARE, a crisis response organization serving individuals and families in some of the poorest communities seventy years in the making. With the help of CARE’s sprawling global community, Microsoft hopes to help support ant deliver tools that help “educate pregnant women, mothers, and their infants during the 1,000 critical days from conception to age two.”

Supported by Windows PCs and Microsoft Excel at CARE’s local office, 550 community healthcare workers were set up and provisioned with mobile devices to aid them in registering, tracking and delivering timely care to pregnant women, mothers and newborns. The phones included an app custom-built by CARE, the Gates Foundation and the Indian government, which allowed for the real-time collection of health information on each client, and synced through the cloud to create a digital health record for each client. And then the magic began…”

Much of Microsoft’s support appears to be behind providing the technology to CARE workers to help make their lives more convenient with up-to-date tools and productivity options. Where some might see Windows 10 and some of Microsoft’s mobile apps irrelevant or cumbersome, the men and women of CARE helping others can now gain access to technology that “gave these health care workers more confidence to do their jobs and engender more trust from those they visited.”

More specifically, as an Upgrade Your World partner, Microsoft will invest $500,000 cash into CARE with an additional $2M worth of software to support the organizations advocate work with improving basic education, ending gender-based violence, increasing healthcare, clean water, and nutritional accessibility for women and others.

To find out more or help with CARE’s global initiative, visit the website here.