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…5 per 1,000 live births. Most of these deaths are preventable; some of the most common causes of death are maternal anemia, jaundice, and beriberi.Infant mortality accounts for 80 percent of child mortality at the national level, and half of all child deaths occur during the neonatal period. Furthermore, nearly one-third of children under the age of five were found to be stunted.Greater access to health education and services would decrease this startling rate of mortality.SolutionKoe-Koe Tech developed the phone-based ‘maymay’ app for pregnant women and mothers across…platforms in Myanmar.OutcomeKoe-Koe Tech’s maymay application resulted in wide-scale health improvements for pregnant women, mothers, and children in Myanmar.Maymay had over 280,000 fans on Facebook and received up to 10,000 messages per month on Facebook Messenger. Additionally, it had 50,000 monthly users on Android, growing at a rate of 6,000 new users per month.Maymay was…

…developing countries. Timely knowledge of a patient’s nutritional status or state of infection could notably improve the speed of recovery. Solution The aim of the project was to further develop a medical tool to be used by healthcare personnel in rural developing countries to improve the quality of care provided to mothers, young children and critically ill patients. The idea for the project builds on a novel, non-invasive, commercially available technology to study the microcirculation in humans, called sidestream dark field (SDF) imaging. The SDF device is a…

Issue Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer and the leading cause of cancer death among women worldwide. Low- and middle-income countries have poorer outcomes for cancer and, in Uganda, breast cancer greatly impacts the lives of women, their families and communities, as women present with later-stage and more aggressive breast cancers than in developed countries. Solution The project in Uganda was designed to evaluate the feasibility of introducing low-cost, easy-to-perform breast ultrasound scans, along with a diagnosis and treatment pathway, in order to increase early detection, provide effective treatment options…

Issue In Sub-Saharan Africa, health systems designed to provide disease-specific care are poorly equipped to respond to the rapidly rising burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Simultaneously, the use of antiretroviral therapy (ART) has increased the life expectancy of people living with HIV, to such an extent that HIV is now considered a chronic condition. These …the existing organizational system within the HIV clinic and strengthened capacity to deliver integrated HIV and NCD services in a ‘one-stop’ model. Integrated guidelines and operating procedures for the management of DM and HTN in HIV clinics were developed and provided the basis for operationalizing integrated HIV–NCD health services. The project team developed a training…diagnosed with HTN. Of 4,428 patients screened for DM, 37 were diagnosed with the condition. It is anticipated that there will be 40% fewer strokes in the group of patients on HTN treatment, and long-term reductions in renal failure and death from cardiovascular disease are also anticipated. A total of 930 women were referred from…

Issue Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease that was responsible for 1.5 million deaths in 2014, with 9.6 million new cases reported that year. TB is transmitted though aerosol droplets, with cough being the most important cause of infection. Cough in people with active pulmonary TB disease arises as a result of the inflammatory response to the mycobacterial pulmonary infection and a reduction in cough is assumed to represent an adequate response to treatment. A laboratory-free test for assessing recovery from TB is…could serve as a remote, laboratory-free non-invasive indicator of treatment efficacy. The application would run on a smartphone and monitor audio input. When the intensity of the signal is greater than a set limit, it acquires data from the input, records it and sends it to a web server to be analyzed. Modification of a…

Issue In Africa, healthcare providers are often concerned about effectively delivering longitudinal medical care. Electronic medical record (EMR) systems are increasingly being adopted to support the delivery of healthcare, including capturing vaccination records over a person's lifetime. Solution Implemented in Ghana, this project developed PhaaseID, a biometrically-linked EMR and vaccination registry database. PhaaseID provides both …medical record. PhaaseID is a fully developed electronic medical record that can maintain all aspects of patient records, including physical examination, laboratory results, diagnosis, treatment and plan for follow-up. It can also provide full documentation of treatment location and home village or city. All fields are customizable for easy entry and entries include ICD codes, as well as codes unique to the Ghana Health Services system. A unique feature of PhaaseID allows linkage of caregivers to the records of other patients, as well as allowing family…

Issue Despite the significant progress made in improving child health in recent years, infant mortality remains high in some areas in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) during the first six months of a child’s life can have a significant impact on survival rates, yet only 32% of babies in SSA are exclusively breastfed. Financial insecurity in Kenyan slums forces mothers to resume work soon after delivery, resulting in an EBF rate as low as 2% in this region. Solution The Linda Kizazi project is a breastfeeding-friendly initiative comprised of a personal savings plan linked to breastfeeding-friendly, income-generating activities, to ensure mothers from low-income households of the Kibera slums could sustain EBF for six months. The project sought to foster a flexible savings scheme, by partnering with existing financial institutions and leveraging mobile banking platforms that simplify saving logistics and…of the Linda Kizazi approach on EBF, with a total of 1,173 pregnant women. Outcome The project team is currently analyzing the RCT results. Across all study follow-up visits, nearly a third of the participants were lost to follow-up due to a high migration rate within the slum and residential displacement caused by railway construction…

Issue Over 780 million people lack access to clean water. Many of the available solutions for purifying water are expensive, and/or rely on technology that does not reflect the needs and challenges of the users who would most benefit. There is a clear need to develop an affordable, more accessible solution to cleaning drinking water …impact on an estimated 500 residents of the pilot community. The most direct and intense impact was on the 15 women who participated in the small-batch production groups for the CleanCube units, who earned enough to supplement their family income by 30–50%.  By creating and testing community education events, the CleanCube team observed the effectiveness of this local intervention in teaching water health and also in promoting the CleanCube brand. The last critical piece of CleanCube’s system design model was the distribution strategy of the product. The CleanCube team developed a clear understanding of conventional distribution channels in local markets, and the door-to-door ‘Ambassador’ model…

…the environment without any treatment, creating what is arguably today’s biggest avoidable public health issue. Waterborne diseases kill more than two million people annually and cause severe illness for countless others. The failure to better handle human waste is the high cost of conventional wastewater and fecal sludge treatment plants. Solution Pivot has a novel approach to fecal sludge management.  Instead…removal from sludge that occurs in the greenhouses, and doing so at the lowest cost possible, is the key to making the overall process commercially viable.  Since receiving funding support, the team has built and commissioned a complete demonstration plant in Kigali, Rwanda, that processes 100 m3 of fecal sludge per day. They are selling their fuel to several Rwandan industries, including…Outcome The project team was able to optimize the technical processes and become adept with plant operations at the pilot scale. Concurrent with solar drying optimization research, significant strides were also made towards overall commercial scale-up, with key milestone achievements being: 1)     Securing approval from the City of Kigali to build a demonstration plant, with expectation…