Your child is feverish and hacking, so you rush to the pharmacy to buy some cough syrup. If you’re living in the United States or Germany, you trust that the bottle contains exactly what the label describes. But in the developing world, there’s a one-in-three chance the medicine you purchase will be fake.

Counterfeit drugs are a big and cruel business across much of Africa. They not only waste consumers’ money but put public health at risk. Western tools for authenticating pharmaceuticals— such as chemical testing, nanotechnologies, radio frequency identification, or holograms— rely on labs and technologies that aren’t always available in the developing world, where even electricity is unreliable. And even if government regulatory agencies are in place, they lack the resources to match well-funded counterfeiters.

“All these options have failed us,” says Ashifi Gogo, a young, Dartmouth College-trained engineer who is a native of Ghana. “They don’t work in developing nations.” Gogo is the cofounder of mPedigree, a start-up that has devised a method for using mobile phones—ubiquitous in the developing world—to put drug authentication into the hands of consumers.

Here’s how the drug authentication system works: At the point of sale, a buyer scratches off a label to reveal a unique numeric code. Using text messaging, the buyer sends this code to an automated hotline, which checks a database and reports back immediately whether the medication is authentic or fake. If it’s counterfeit, the buyer can demand a refund on the spot.

During a trial in Ghana, most consumers had no trouble using scratch-off labels to authenticate pharmacy purchases. The trial also indicated that elderly consumers prefer talking to a hotline operator rather than texting. A survey revealed that nearly half of consumers were unaware of the prevalence of counterfeit drugs on the retail market. Yet the World Health Organization estimates that counterfeit drugs account for 30 percent of the drugs sold in the developing world.

The most promising aspect of mPedigree’s model may well be its bottom-up design. “Consumers are the ones who are most invested in drug safety, the ones with the most to lose,” says Gogo. Although mPedigree also encourages government enforcement, he adds that “empowering consumers is what this technology is about.”

That makes sense to Marv Shepherd, president of the Partnership for Safe Medicines. “We have to get control of this problem. Consumers need to trust that they are getting authentic products. Any deterrent that can be implemented will be helpful to combat “a global problem that shows no signs of slowing down.”

Under the mPedigree business model, consumers pay no premium for the assurance of drug safety. Drug companies eager to protect their brands have shown a willingness to cover the costs of texting, redirecting a portion of their marketing budgets to cover SMS fees, Gogo says. Ghana’s four telecommunication firms collaborated during the first trial, making the same four-digit access code work across all mobile carriers.

Eventually, Gogo intends to sustain mPedigree’s drug safety efforts with a for-profit venture to authenticate other commonly counterfeited goods, such as clothing and entertainment products. “Nobody dies from buying a fake DVD,” he says, “but big companies still want to be able to protect their IP [intellectual property].”

Read more stories by Suzie Boss.