14 entrepreneurs in sexual reproductive health and what it took to get here!
Fourteen entrepreneurs participated in our second cycle of Up Accelerate acceleration program, which supports young people that are addressing challenges in sexual reproductive health with mentorship, seed funding, business training and technical guidance. The goal was to help them build product, and deploy it to market within four months.
After fifty two (52) submissions with two hundred and twenty-five (25) participants, four teams consisting of 14 entrepreneurs were selected to participate in our Up Accelerate cycle II. These represent some of the greatest ideas from young social entrepreneurs solving some of the most challenging sexual reproductive health problems faced in their own communities. The teams were addressing challenges in how to improve access to maternal health supplies and medicines, and how data may be used to improve healthcare planning, monitoring and service delivery.
This cohort of four (4) high-potential social entrepreneur teams, have undergone intense business training, mentorship, technical guidance and seed funding to enable their products and ideas grow and deploy to market — this journey has been an Acceleration that culminates to a demo day on 5th October 2017 at Imperial Royale Hotel in Kampala.
The participants — that typically consist of undergraduate students and some industry practitioners have had the opportunity to step out of their daily grind to reexamine everything from prototyping to product design among others.
“Very exposing. We learnt so much from the program that we never knew before; running a business, managing a startup, managing competition, fund-raising, making your product known to investors. mapping out your end-users experiences.,” — Lydia Asiimwe Team leader EcoSmart Pads describes her experience with Up Accelerate.
Introducing the Participating teams at Demo day.
Ecosmart pad:
Lydia Asiimwe the Team leader shares — I personally believe that a woman shouldn’t have to suffer because of conditions that nature brings to her by virtue of her gender. My team and I were driven to develop EcoSmart, a solution tackles the problem of women and girls from low income backgrounds (who make up the largest percentage of women in Uganda) being unable to afford sanitary pads and resorting to the use of unhealthy and/or rudimentary methods when managing their menstruation.
The ecosmart pad recycles sugarcane bagasse collected from sugar factories and uses it to make biodegradable pads. These pads are expected to be sold at half the price of the existing pads on the market.
iDrain:
Julius and Amos noticed that most people esp, mothers affected by pleural effusion were using mineral water bottles in hospitals to drain pleural effusions. This challenged the duo and got them thinking hard about how they could make a difference — make life better for those affected.
IDrain is an improved chest drainage system that removes the pleural accumulation in patients (new mothers), With this improved solution they believe every mother who has had this kind of complication due to a surgical procedure will have access to improved surgical tools to help them manage the condition better.
M-Scan:
Respectively by name they are Innocent Menyo (Lead), Phyllis, Prosper and Ivan — together they developed Mscan, an ultrasonic probe and software that will support ultrasound scanning in low resource areas so as to address the problem of inadequate ultrasound services for expecting mothers.
For this team, this is an innovation driven by challenges they witnessed in the local health centres they were posted in — Phyllis shares — “During my undergraduate degree at medical school, we were often times posted to rural areas for Community Based Education, Research and Services and I kept witnessing several mothers die because of risk factors of maternal mortality that could be scanned, detected early and managed appropriately”.
“It is then that I realized that I had to find a way to bring ultrasound services to the rural mothers of Uganda.” — she adds.
DigiHealth:
They are Jacqueline Mutumba, Obed Mogeni, Aidah Bakubuza. Together they built a web-based platform/mobile app to help address the problem of manual patient data collection.
According to the WHO — Africa Observatory, Data is crucial in improving health. The ultimate objective of collecting data is to inform health programme planning as well as policy-making and ultimately, global health outcomes and equity. A well-functioning health information system empowers decision-makers to manage and lead more effectively by providing useful evidence at the lowest possible cost, they pointed out the Uganda’s current data collection system is largely paper based, making it difficult to store and access, computerizing the process would improve the completeness and timeliness of data submitted.
DigiHealth seeks to digitize this process for the users (i.e. medical professionals who conduct outreaches in the field) so that the data collected is accurate, secure and easily transferred onto the hospital database.
These participating teams are solving challenges that have been identified through validation workshops conducted with industry stakeholders that include NGOs, private sector, entrepreneurs and donors. The challenges include: Improving access to essential medicines and health supplies in maternal health, and the use of data to improve healthcare planning, delivery and monitoring.
To book a seat at the upcoming demo day event, click here: https://goo.gl/pyEuEo
Also join the conversation on Sexual reproductive health challenges in Uganda’s health sector and the solutions young social entrepreneurs are bringing to the table using tech on twitter with the hashtag #UpAccelerate.
About Up Accelerate
Up Accelerate is the Ugandan brand of the UNFPA Innovation Accelerator, an initiative of the UNFPA Regional Office for East and Southern Africa that seeks to accelerate youth-led social enterprises focusing on Sexual and Reproductive Health. Find more at http://upaccelerate.co.ug The initiative is implemented by Outbox in Uganda.
