by: Alanna Shaikh

There is no backchannel at Women Deliver. The tweets from this conference are almost all official and from attending organizations.  Global health people don’t use social media. It’s rare for global health professionals to blog or tweet.

This conference embodies my community of practice. It’s full of people who care about the things I do, and work for the same kinds of projects that I do. I have been happily geeking out at the technical panels, enjoying my chance encounters with other people who can talk about contraception in technical detail and care about health sector financing reform.

Photo courtesy of http://blog.keylex.com/index.php/tag/social-media/

But it’s been a stark reminder of how little social media has to do with my day job. If these people – my community of practice – have heard of twitter, they don’t know what it is. Or they think it has nothing to do with them. They still think blogs are career-killing personal diaries. They don’t know how to use an RSS reader or why they would want to.

And while I have never been convinced that social media will save the world, I do think that sharing ideas is key to any field. Social media is a phenomenal tool for sharing ideas, especially in one as broadly based and geographically diverse as social media.

Global health information still trickles slowly via journal articles and conference panels. What about the people who can’t afford conference travel and journal subscriptions? What about people working in rural areas? I love global health and stay as up to date as I can but I had never heard of combination HIV prevention before Monday because I don’t have enough journal subscriptions.

On the other hand, I know a ton about frontlineSMS:medic.

Global health needs to get in the game. It’s not about keeping up with trends for the sake of being cool or well connected. It’s about sharing good ideas faster and increasing the impact of our work.

That’s one reason I am so proud of writing here at End the Neglect. The Global Network blogs, and it tweets (@Global_Network, @Global_ErinF, @Global_StephH), and it does both of them right. Our people on twitter are actual people with actual voices. They are interesting to follow. This blog, too, is written by real people and not a canned conglomerate of pre-approved media messages.

The nature of social media is that it lets everyone make their voice heard. It brings new ideas to interested people, and gives people who are already engaged the chance to learn more. It is a natural fit for NTDs – the old media let them disappear from the public consciousness. With social media, we don’t have to let that happen. We can keep reaching out about the impact of the NTDs, sharing new approaches to fighting them, and building a coalition to make sure that we end these pain, treatable diseases.

But NTDs aren’t the only health issues that matter. (I’m pretty sure I am allowed to say that on this blog.) We don’t want to be heard because we’re the only ones having a conversation. Global health professionals need to be writing, blogging, tweeting, linking on facebook and making our voices as loud as possible. No one does global health work for the money. We do it because we care. Shouldn’t we care enough to make some noise?

Alanna Shaikh is an expert in health consulting, writing about global health for UN Dispatch and about international relief and development at Blood & Milk. She also serves as a frequently contributing blogger to ‘End the Neglect.”