Matt Berg
Matt Berg is the CEO of Ona, which he co-founded with Peter Lubell-Doughtie, U'kanga Dickson and Roger Wong. Previously, he was the director of ICT for the Millennium Villages Project at the Columbia University’s Earth Institute and member of its Department of Mechanical Engineering research group in Columbia's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. He is the ICT Director of the Millennium Villages Project at Columbia and the technology director for ChildCount+. In 2010 Berg was included in the Time 100 Most Influential People of the World.[1]
Biography and work
Berg was born in 1977 in a small village of Cameroon and grew up in Senegal. He graduated with honors from Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois in 2000. He has an MBA from Thunderbird School of Global Management. Berg is responsible for the development of new mobile phone platform ChildCount+ created under the framework of RapidSMS. The project helps to reduce preventable diseases in the poorest villages of Africa through continuous monitoring, and it is grounded in a network of community health workers that partner to improve health and nutrition in impoverished areas.
As the ICT Director for the Millennium Villages Project at Columbia, Berg oversaw the design and implementation of ICT activities in Millennium Village Project sites. He scaled up ChildCount+ to monitor over 100,000 pregnant mothers and children under five. Prior to joining ChildCount+, Berg helped to build the Rural Technology Lab in Mali that provides programming training to local students.
With Ona, Berg is building a software engineering and design firm based in Nairobi, Kenya and New York City. Ona's data tools are designed to improve child and maternal health, governance, agriculture, access to infrastructure, and government accountability.