Can technology help drive social behaviour change?

I live a life of frustration and this is a direct result of things that I interact with daily, unavoidably. There is no excuse worse than that of habit to perpetuate behaviour that both irks and causes inconvenience.

Unfortunately, many innovative deployments in Kenya meant to bring about efficiencies or other societal benefits are stuck due to habits, solidified over years of repetitive expression.

Think of the current cash-lite drive by government that has faced pushback from literally all publics because it represents a major shift in our ways of work and also breaks cartels that thrive on chaos.

First in line is the transport sector, which seems impervious to any interventions meant to make mass transit safer and more reliable.

Speed governors that were entrenched by law are tampered with on the regular, resulting in a jump in road casualties following a dip soon after their introduction.

Also, despite the creation of speed zones with recently put up signage, compliance is virtually non-existent and if there is no speed gun in sight, then the regulations are swiftly assumed.

My pet peeve, however, is the lack of road courtesy exhibited by a large section of supposedly certified drivers, especially those in the public service sector.

Healthcare service delivery comes second in my book of frustrations with many practitioners unable to efficiently operate their practice and in the end lead to massive loss of productive hours for clients in waiting rooms, whether ill or simply looking for a medical opinion.

The problem is not solely the fault of the practitioners, with clients playing a role in exacerbating the problem by way of ad hoc service consumption — almost averse to scheduling and prepayment. Is performance based healthcare possible, at least starting that the first touch point of delivery?

Smart deployments along the lines of telemetry can deliver change in the transport sector and patient centric healthcare service deliver tools, sanity in the health segment.

At the back of the above examples should be technology whose intelligence and analytics will ensure a swift financial jolt or inconvenience as that is clearly the only panacea to ensure adoption and alignment of value adding innovations at scale.

Mr Njihia is CEO of Symbiotic. Twitter - @mbuguanjihia.