Arogya World’s low-budget, high-impact strategy for marking the anniversary of the UN High Level Meeting on NCDs.

In September of 2011, we announced a new mHealth commitment at the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting. In partnership with Nokia Life Tools we pledged to reach at least 1 million users of Nokia Life Tools in India with compelling messages about diabetes prevention, developed in conjunction with experts at Emory University. On Monday, January 9, 2012, the first diabetes prevention text messages were sent to the first of the 1 million consumers we have promised to reach – a very exciting milestone.

Organized by Arogya World in partnership with HRIDAY, and with support from Salesworth India Pvt. Ltd., three hundred school children participated in a week-long city-wide poster-making competition in selected schools throughout New Delhi on the dual occasion of Children’s Day and World Diabetes Day (WDD) on November 14th, 2011.

A compelling new video – going viral on the Internet as we speak – asks the question, what’s the single best thing you can do for your health? The answer, according to narrator Dr. Mike Evans, is to limit your sitting and sleeping in other words your periods of inactivity to 23 ½ hours a day.

The acronym may be new to you. And you may not have heard of them grouped this way, but NCDs are diseases like cancer, diabetes, respiratory and cardiovascular illness. The kind of sick you get for a long time. That didn’t come from a mosquito, or a bad drink of water, or physical contact with someone infected. The kind of sick that… wait for it… causes two out of every three deaths worldwide.