About 4 years in the past, certainly one of Tafadzwa Munzwa’s cousins grew to become pregnant. In the end, she and her child have been okay, however Munzwa was alarmed by the poor high quality of the care she obtained.
That have was Munzwa’s first actual take a look at the problem girls confronted getting top-quality maternal well being care in Zambia, the place they lived, and different nations in Sub-Saharan Africa. So, round two years in the past, he co-founded DawaHealth to develop a screening, profiling and administration maternal healthcare device to handle the excessive variety of being pregnant and childbirth-related problems resulting in maternal deaths within the area. “We’re democratizing entry to maternal well being care,” he says.
Tafadzwa Munzwa
“We’re democratizing entry to maternal well being care,” he says.
Preventable Problems
Munzwa’s imaginative and prescient for the corporate rested on just a few points. One was the excessive variety of deaths from preventable being pregnant and childbirth-related problems in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia—two-thirds of complete world deaths. The opposite: The appreciable variety of healthcare employees in Sub-Saharan Africa who aren’t employed, because of price range constraints; these healthcare employees who’re employed are so overworked, they’re unable to supply high-quality care. On the identical time, most middle-and-low-income households, struggling to make ends meet, can’t afford medical insurance.
His reply was to construct a platform that, mainly, creates distant clinics in communities by tapping that military of unemployed and underemployed first-level clinicians within the area, permitting them to supply help to sufferers the place they dwell.
Particularly, a community of in-the-field healthcare employees obtain kits with cell instruments to take with them throughout twice month-to-month visits. With these gadgets, they assess their sufferers’ situation after which add the knowledge into the platform to be evaluated by a central medical staff. Excessive-risk sufferers are referred to the closest well being outposts.
Medical kits embody such gadgets as blood stress and hemoglobin screens and latex gloves, to call just a few examples. The corporate additionally supplies instruments for screening infants for congenital or prenatal infections, plus moveable ultrasound scans and tablets. Earlier than starting their work with sufferers, healthcare brokers obtain coaching on their cell gadgets.
As well as, pregnant girls and nursing moms get entry by way of cell gadgets to weekly well being help in a language of their alternative to assist them id doubtlessly pressing well being circumstances in between visits. (It’s additionally accessible by way of an online portal and textual content/audio chatbot).
Moms pay a small payment—4 occasions cheaper than non-public healthcare, in accordance with Munzwa—and clinicians pay a month-to-month subscription for the medical kits.
Twin Operate
Within the course of, the platform, known as DawaMom, performs a twin operate: offering pressing, reasonably priced healthcare to girls and making a supply of revenue for unemployed clinicians. Healthcare brokers receives a commission for the ladies they confer with the platform, in addition to for affected person assessments and examinations. Moms obtain a reduction after they refer another person to this system. And, in accordance with the corporate, well being providers are 50% cheaper than these offered by common amenities.
To this point, the corporate has helped about 4,000 moms by way of a pilot, in accordance with Munzwa. For the following 5 years, he plans to deal with increasing the corporate’s maternal care footprint to different areas. By 2027, the purpose is to succeed in about 40% of pregnant girls and nursing moms in Southern Africa. Finally he needs to broaden to different circumstances, like sickle cell anemia.
DawaHealth was lately chosen as certainly one of MIT Resolve’s 40 2022 Solver Groups, profitable $10,000, plus enrollment in a nine-month mentorship program. Due to the visibility and help of that award, the corporate additionally was certainly one of 5 groups lately chosen for the The Well being Entry Prize supported by Johnson & Johnson Affect Ventures, a fund inside the Johnson & Johnson Basis. The winners have been awarded $175,000 in complete.