One-line solution summary:
An AI-powered platform reshaping access to maternal health for pregnant and nursing mothers in low-income communities of Africa.
Pitch your solution.
Globally over 830 mothers die daily from pregnancy-related complications, with 99% of them in developing countries like Zambia. These deaths are primarily due to the lack of the right information and tools to assist mothers.
Dawa Health is a digital health platform leveraging on web-mobile-USSD/SMS technology. The platform is supporting mothers with smartphones and those with feature-phones. With this tool, mothers receive remote and self-monitoring maternal health.
Dawa Health is researching computer vision technology to automate data capturing from self-monitoring hardware to minimize human error and create data consistency. The platform is democratizing access to maternal health for early intervention to mitigate pregnancy complications.
We are distributing the Sayana Press self-injectable contraceptive kit. This has been proven to lower maternal mortality by more than 25%, publication from PATH.
We provide support to mothers through digital channels accessible to most of the mothers in different languages used locally.
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
In Zambia, about 860,000 mothers give birth annually, with 7 losing their lives daily from pregnancy-related complications. Primarily this is from the lack of the right information and tools to help them make informed decision making early. We provide support to mothers through digital channels accessible to most of the mothers in different languages used locally.
The World Health Organisation (W.H.O) recommends maternal mortality of less than 70/100,000 live births. However, in most Sub-Sahara African countries, maternal mortality is above 200/100,000 live births.
Mothers lack access to the right tools and information to mitigate pregnancy complications early. Also, health workers in rural communities don't have the right training and support they need to aid with last-mile service delivery.
In Zambia, more than 56.5% of the population lives in rural and marginalized communities. Formal health centers in most of these communities are far, and with poor resources. These problems are making maternal health expensive and inaccessible to mothers.
What is your solution?
Dawa Health is an AI-powered digital health platform connecting pregnant and nursing mothers to remote healthcare professionals. The platform has an interactive multi-lingual chat-bot (RUDO), helping answer questions mothers have regarding their pregnancy.
The DawaMom mobile app is a tool tailored to advise mothers week on week on through their pregnancy. It uses the day of the last menstrual period to calculate the age of the pregnancy and the expected delivery date. This method is to prevent overwhelming mothers on their learning curve. The app has a baby section were mothers learn the different development stages their babies are going through.
We are currently researching and developing computer-vision algorithms to automate data collection from self-monitoring hardware. The self-monitoring hardware kit has an arm blood pressure monitor and urine dipsticks. These data helps doctors identify signs of pregnancy-induced complications early.
Sayana Press is an easy-to-use hormonal birth control option for women. It is an injection, with a very small needle, that women can give to themselves to prevent pregnancies for 3 months.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
In Zambia, maternal mortality is 213/100,000 live births which is above the recommended number by the World Health Organisation. The addressable market in 5 years is 4.35 million mothers in Zambia with 56.5% in rural and marginalized communities.
Dawa Health conducted a patient survey with more than 150 mothers to get insights for product development. From the survey, some of the insights were that mothers in rural communities don't have access to smartphones hence need of a USSD-SMS application alternative.
The DawaMom application empowers pregnant and nursing mothers to self-monitor at home improving access to maternal health. This allows early detection of pregnancy-induced complications giving room for effective intervention.
Mothers with smartphones have resorted to pregnancy apps on the internet without guarantee of being accurate. With our partnerships we are working on getting certification and endorsement from the ministry of health of Zambia.
Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?
Expand access to high-quality, affordable care for women, new mothers, and newbornsExplain how the problem, your solution, and your solution’s target population relate to the Challenge and your selected dimension.
Dawa Health is a digital health startup focused on reducing the number of maternal deaths associated with pregnancy. Under the Maternal and Newborn Health Challenge, we're primarily targeting mothers to empower them with necessary information and tools to either prevent unwanted pregnancies or have safe pregnancies.
Our platform is educating mothers on medically recommended interventions to improve pregnancy outcome. The self-monitoring feature allows early detection and intervention of pregnancy complications.
The USSD application is reaching women in marginalized communities of the region who are the most vulnerable. This model is easy to expand across the region impacting millions of mothers.
Who is the primary delegate for your solution?
Tafadzwa Kalisto Munzwa
What is your solution’s stage of development?
Pilot: An organization deploying a tested product, service, or business model in at least one communityIn what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Lusaka, ZambiaIf you have additional video content that explains your solution, provide a YouTube or Vimeo link here:
Which of the following categories best describes your solution?
A new application of an existing technologyDescribe what makes your solution innovative.
Dawa Health is reshaping access to maternal health for pregnant and nursing mothers in Zambia. Our solution is a combination of hardware and software working in collaboration to allow accessible and remote antenatal care. We have a self-monitoring kit with a blood pressure monitor, urinalysis strips, pregnancy HCG dipstick, and latex gloves. Also, we have a web-portal where mothers can create accounts to receive remote consultation.
Pregnant mothers are at risk of developing pregnancy-induced high blood pressure and urinary tract infections as their immunity is compromised. Our self-monitoring kit allow mothers to continuously monitor parameters like blood pressure, white cells and protein in urine to intervene with any signs of pregnancy complication. The mothers enter parameter data into the application allowing a doctor to advise remotely.
Our USSD application works in collaboration with a health-worker to allow mothers in peri-urban and rural areas access quality antenatal care. A mother register to get a health worker visiting them weekly.
Both systems allow mothers to receive quality antenatal care and management weekly. The solution acts as both an educational and a self-monitoring tool for pregnant and nursing mothers.
Our main competitors are companies like Virtual doctors (Zambia), Babymigo (Nigeria), GiftedMom (Cameroon) and traditional ante-natal clinics. The platforms provide some of the services we provide without machine learning and self-monitoring kits to mothers we offer.
Describe the core technology that powers your solution.
Dawa Health is leveraging a lot on mobile phone technology. We are a mHealth tech startup focused on pregnant and nursing mothers. The main technologies empowering our solution is an android application, web application, USSD & SMS application, blood pressure monitor technology, and molecular reaction technology in HCG and urine dipsticks.
Hardware technology involves the blood pressure monitor, and HCG and urine dipsticks in our kit. The mother self measure their blood pressure daily to enable early intervention of pregnancy-induced high blood pressure. A cuff is inflated over the upper arm until no blood flow occurs within the brachial artery. As the cuff is deflated below the systolic pressure, the reducing pressure exerted on the artery allows blood to flow through it and sets up a detectable vibration in the arterial wall. When the cuff pressure falls below the patient's diastolic pressure, blood flows smoothly through the artery in the usual pulses, without any vibration being set up in the wall.
The HCG and urine dipsticks are plastic stick with strips of chemicals on it, when coated with urine, the chemical strips will change color if certain substances are present or if certain levels are above, or below, normal which can indicate the presence of compounds like proteins, ketones, hemoglobin, and nitrites.
Using computer vision and machine learning, the android application identifies numbers from the blood pressure monitors and chemicals strips automating data collection. Through Dawa Health mobile phone application the data is sent to a doctor for remote advice.
Provide evidence that this technology works.
The blood pressure monitor technology working with an inflatable cuff over the upper arm is the most commonly used system to measure blood pressures in modern hospitals. The molecular technology used on strips were color change with metabolites presence is also used modern-day in hospitals. These are well-documented technologies mostly used for diagnostic purposes in hospitals. Dawa Health's approach in different on delivery, using these technologies as preventative tools rather than curative.
Computer vision is a new technology getting quick adoption across different industries due to its usefulness. In Zambia, Agripredict is currently using this technology to make crop diagnosis which allows farmers to get early intervention and link to their nearest agro dealer. Its a technology that has proven to work to input data, and can be scaled relatively easy while developed.
USSD application are a widely used technology in Africa. A successful USSD application developed has been mobile money originally developed by mPesa in Kenya and got adopted across Sub-Sahara Africa. A well-structured USSD application can scale in Africa because most users have feature phones. This allows companies to reach users even in the most marginalized communities. Our USSD is a new application of the same technology. Mothers in areas with limited and inefficient clinics can register with our service. They receive expected changes to their bodies and baby's development each week in their local language.
These technologies working in collaboration allow mothers to receive remote and continuous antenatal care for the best outcome.
Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:
What is your theory of change?
In Zambia, of the 860 000 women who gave birth last year, 7 were dying daily from pregnancy-related complications which are avoidable. This was because only 29% had received good quality antenatal care. Mothers don't receive good quality antenatal care because they don't have access to the right information and tools to help them manage the pregnancy period.
Our solution will have an impact on this problem because it is tailored to advise women on expected changes weekly and warning them on problems to look out for. This is a medium for teaching women good practice antenatal care behaviors. Over a period of 5 years, the effect will have a ripple effect on the population changing the general perceived behavior on seeking maternal health.
Our system has a hardware component that allows women to self-monitor at home. This empowers mothers to have more control over their pregnancy outcome. With continuous access to antenatal care, there will be room for early intervention before complications get out of hand.
Our community health worker model will train mothers from the community to act as ambassadors as well as creating a source of income for them. This will enable even the most vulnerable mothers on the population to have access to good quality antenatal. The mothers will receive tailored messages care via our SMS application onto their feature phones.
From a pilot, of our chatbot service we got women requesting a system that works offline and available on USSD. This made us decide to develop our android and USSD application.
Select the key characteristics of your target population.
Which of the UN Sustainable Development Goals does your solution address?
In which countries do you currently operate?
In which countries will you be operating within the next year?
How many people does your solution currently serve? How many will it serve in one year? In five years?
Currently, our solution is being piloted with 170 mothers. The 150 of them are using the Dawa Health chatbot. Also, the chatbot is available in local languages. The remaining 20 mothers are self-monitoring with Dawa kits. With limited resources, we have piloted with 170 mothers.
In a year, we hope to pilot our service with 10,000 mothers across Lusaka. The system will run with at least 100 kits. Through partnerships with ZICTA(Zambia Information and Communication Technology Authority) and Africa'sTalking, our USSD application scales direct impact per kit. Scaling creates employment to 5 health-workers. The community health workers will work with mothers across compounds of Lusaka.
By 2025, we hope to scale our solution to at least 50 000 active annual mothers. Our goal is ambitious but achievable because platforms like GiftedMom(Cameroon) has demonstrated it. This will create employment to at least 50 healthcare workers. As the company grows, we hope to grow our core team to 8 full-time employees.
What are your goals within the next year and within the next five years?
By the end of 2020, we plan to have a board of directors. We believe this makes our team more accountable and we achieve more of our goals. Currently, through Venture Capital for Africa mentor-driven capital program, we onboarded Silumesii as our mentor. Silumesii is the co-founder of BongoHive and director of consultancy. We meet weekly to plan our course of action and measure how effective our team is.
We reached out to UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) hoping to partner with them to expand our service to the mothers they are working with. Also, we plan to partner with clinics offering antenatal services across Lusaka.
Dawa Health is looking to raise more working capital through maternal health grants from partners across the globe. This will scale our core team from 1 full-time employee to at least 4. Expanding our services will create employment for at least 5 health workers who work with mothers from Lusaka compounds.
By 2025, we plan on having a full-time core team of at 8 employees and 50 health workers translating to 50 000 active mothers using the service. We plan to expand the service to nursing mothers who can get additional service on the platform. Further partnerships we hope are with organizations like UNICEF and UNDP.
What barriers currently exist for you to accomplish your goals in the next year and in the next five years?
The main barriers to achieve our goals in the goals are technical skills. We want to automate data collection from hardware to minimize human error in the current system. In the current system mothers manually enter data into our applications for remote antenatal care. Computer vision will allow our applications to capture data from images automatically without human input cutting out human errors.
In Zambia, there is a limited number of skilled machine learning developers to work on our algorithms. The available skill is expensive and occupied with other offers already. Operating in a highly regulated field like healthcare requires an experienced legal team on board. Access to experienced teams comes with a heavy ticket.
Another barrier is the period the population adjusts to innovation. It requires culture change for the adoption of new technologies and services.
How do you plan to overcome these barriers?
To overcome our barriers we have partnered with organizations like ZICTA and BongoHive. These are reputable and trusted brands in Zambia. Leveraging on their names and networks we can onboard mothers on to our platform. We have onboarded Silumesii, co-founder of BongoHive as our mentor to help drive us in the right direction.
Through BongoHive we have raised USD 10 000 from Emory University Business School and Amazon Web Services. This has created working capital for the team and technical frameworks to develop our services on. We have partnered with Corpus legal practitioners on pro bono to help us deal with legal technicalities. The partnership is short-term but we hope to create a long-lasting collaboration to help our team grow the Dawa Health brand.
Through our partnership with ZICTA and Africa'sTalking.com, we plan to launch our USSD application on 2 of the largest telecom companies in Zambia. With this, we will onboard mothers with feature phones to access the same quality antenatal services as those with smartphones.
We are pursuing a partnership with UNFPA to pilot with the pregnant mothers they are working with. This cuts down customer acquisition costs for Dawa Health. The partnership unlocks more working capital increasing our chance of success.
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar modelsIf you selected Other, please explain here.
n/a
How many people work on your solution team?
Currently, people working on our solution is a team of 7 people.
We have 1 full-time employee who is running operations. We have 4 part-time employees who are finishing off their tertiary education. Among the 4, there are 3 co-founders and one employee who is leading communication for the organization.
We have two mentors from BongoHive helping us achieve our goals. We have contracted 2 developers to beef up our development team.
We are planning on outsourcing an accounting expect to do our books in the next few months.
How many years have you worked on your solution?
3
Why are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?
Our team has over 20 years of combined experience in running startups, machine learning, programming, business development and practicing medicine.
Tafadzwa Kalisto Munzwa (CEO)- is a medical professional at the University Teaching Hospital, Lusaka. He formerly co-founded Beatmakers zw and Glett. Beatmakers was a music production company which was making instrumentals for the growing music industry in Zimbabwe between 2014-16. Glett was an agro-innovative company helping small scale farmers preserve their products using natural ways.
Tafadzwa was selected for MIT-Harvard healthcare innovation Bootcamp (2019). Also, he received a scholarship from INISA (Germany) in 2019. Southern Africa Startup Awards: Zambia awarded him the Brave Founder Beginnings Award 2019.
Chungu C Chama (CTO)- is a 3rd-year computer science student at the University of Zambia. He co-founded Octalweb a web development and hosting company bringing Zambian businesses online. He was selected as one of the 3 Huawei Innovation challenge finalists to represent the country in South Africa. He has certificates from Cisco Networking Academy, Huawei, and Coursera.
Progress P Mahureva (CTO)- has a B.com in Business Management majoring in finance. He has interned with Old mutual Zimbabwe, First Mutual Health and Munch.
Takunda G Mugwagwa (Medical Officer)- is a medical doctor at the Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals.
Mary Kanawila (Communication Lead)- is a 3rd-year pharmacy student at Evelyn Hone College. The is a radio presenter at Flava FM and Youth Initiative forum.
Francis Chikweto (AI Engineer)- is a Ph.D. student in Biomedical Engineering at Tohoku University in Japan.
What organizations do you currently partner with, if any? How are you working with them?
Dawa Health currently has two groups of partners for product development and initial piloting:
- BongoHive and Jacaranda Hub which are our ecosystem partners. Through them, we have raised resources to develop our product. We have also received Amazon Web Service credits to perfect product.
- ZICTA, Africa'sTalking.com and UNFPA in Zambia, and clinics in Lusaka we are piloting the solution and using their infrastructure, capital, and resources to support the deployments.
- Medcross Hospital, MediHope Medical Center, and Mommies and Munchkins are our distribution partners to reach more mothers
What is your business model?
While our DawaMom application and website are fee-free. We lease out a self-monitoring kit at USD 5.68 (100 ZMK)/month. The DawaMom app and self-monitoring kit allows pregnant mothers to access quality antenatal care a button away. Mothers can track several parameters at home and learn good practices of antenatal care from the app.
Mothers can access support service from network of community health workers at USD 1.10 (ZMK 20)/month. We are distributing the Sayana Press Self-injectable kit at USD 2 (ZMK 36)/kit. Also,we will charge vendors to list ads in our application. Through this vendors have more traffic visiting their shops.
These products will be delivered to mothers through our partnerships with local clinics and organizations like UNFPA. We hope organisations like UNFPA and UNDP will pay for mothers from poor communities to receive our service. Mothers need this service because self-monitoring pick out complications early while intervention is still possible.
Do you primarily provide products or services directly to individuals, or to other organizations?
Individual consumers or stakeholders (B2C)What is your path to financial sustainability?
The path to financial sustainability is via a combination of partnerships. We hope to raise additional grants from Tony Elemelu Foundation (USD 5000), ZICTA (USD 2 840) and MIT Solve.
Our lease model with 10 000 mothers by end of year will generate revenues of about USD 56 000.
- We plan to further raise a seed round worth USD 100 000 sometime in 2021.
- With this we scale to at least 30 000 mothers
Long-term our financing will be from revenues generated from leasing out Dawa self-monitoring kits and ads for vendors.
Why are you applying to Solve?
We are applying to Solve to access international support such as mentorship, technical expertise, media and exposure, and business development support. We want to raise more funds to scale the project.
Our barriers include limited machine learning skills in Zambia, and access to MIT Solve community will mitigate these challenges. International partners would help us scale our service with ease in other markets. Limited finances to fund the project.
In which of the following areas do you most need partners or support?
What organizations would you like to partner with, and how would you like to partner with them?
We are hoping to partner with the MIT faculty of Computer Science. This opportunity will expose our team to a pool of experienced talent and advisors. We also hope to partner with Neopenda, who are developing baby monitoring hardware. This partnership will make us expand baby monitoring systems for nursing mothers through the app.
Also, we want to partner with mPharma to improve the efficiency of our medical supply logistics. This will help with the operational focus and discipline of the company. Through this partnership, we hope to lower our cost of procurement of medical supplies to help scale the solution.
Please explain in more detail here.
There is a limited skill pool in machine learning in Zambia to develop our computer vision algorithm. A skilled and experienced team would accelerate our progress and improve our product. Coverage on accredited and recognized media outlets would give our startup exposure to potential international partners.
The health field in Zambia is heavily regulated, and we are seeking experienced legal teams to advise us on how to push boundaries and innovate in such a field.
Solution Team
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CC
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TM
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Tafadzwa Munzwa MD Co-founder & CEO, Dawa Health
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Solution Name:
Dawa Health