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LifeBank Improves Healthcare in Africa

LifeBankFounded in 2016, LifeBank is a Nigerian health technology startup created to address the issue of blood shortages in Nigeria. The startup recently expanded to Kenya and aims to save lives across all of Africa. LifeBank has succeeded in saving more than 10,000 lives in critical emergencies and plans to save 990,000 more lives as it extends its reach to Kenya. The startup works to find technological solutions to improve healthcare in Africa.

LifeBank’s Mission

LifeBank has dedicated itself to solving the problems of healthcare in Africa. Founder Temie Giwa-Tubosun was initially inspired by her own child’s birth, which took place in the United States. The baby was born prematurely and Giwa-Tubosun could have died of postpartum hemorrhage had she given birth in Nigeria. Giwa-Tubosun told Africa Renewal that “Eight out of 10 women who bleed to death while giving birth can be saved if blood is readily available.” Blood shortages are common in Nigeria and other African countries. Giwa-Tubosun created LifeBank to address this issue.

LifeBank has had a profound impact on healthcare in Africa. The innovative company “uses data, technology and smart logistics to improve the discoverability, delivery, affordability and safety of essential medical products like blood and oxygen for health systems” in Nigeria and Kenya. Since its creation, LifeBank has saved thousands of lives by delivering more than 25,000 essential medical products to roughly 550 hospitals in need.

How LifeBank Works

A strong health supply chain engine in Africa is characterized by a 24-hour delivery service from ports to medical centers. LifeBank works to make this process affordable, adaptable and accessible to everyone. LifeBank uses every type of delivery service, including “bikes, boats, trucks, tricycles and drones.” The company utilizes Google Maps to calculate and monitor the routes involved in blood transportation.

LifeBank uses AI and Blockchain in its distribution system. Its deployment services utilize USSD or SMS to ensure universal access. Patients or doctors place a phone call to LifeBank or make an order through the company’s app. Then, LifeBank contacts the blood bank closest to the patient and the delivery service begins. LifeBank’s service is on-demand. It works across eight states in Nigeria and will now expand to Kenya. The company is able to deliver supplies in less than 50 minutes. LifeBank has made a visible impact on healthcare in Africa and intends to continue doing so.

Improving Healthcare in Africa

According to the World Health Organization, “nearly 20% of all global maternal deaths” occur in Nigeria. Access to blood could significantly reduce cases of maternal deaths involving blood loss. The Nigerian National Blood Transfusion Service often raises concerns about the lack of blood donors in the country, which significantly impacts the blood shortage in Nigeria.

LifeBank aims to solve two major problem areas in the health sector of Africa: accessibility and infrastructure. People in need of blood or hospitals, especially those located in rural areas, have no access to essential medical supplies. Further, blood banks are searching for patients and hospitals to provide for. LifeBank helps connect the two, providing quality information and ensuring fast deliveries.

LifeBank hopes to create a more robust healthcare system by strengthening the supply chain engine across Africa. With its expansion to Kenya, it will continue to save more lives by delivering medical supplies to reduce preventable deaths.

– Addison Franklin
Photo: Flickr

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Maternal Mortality and the MOMs Initiative

Maternal Mortality
Maternal mortality is a devastating cause of death for women around the world, especially those who live in low-resource communities or developing countries. Many conditions that cause maternal mortality are preventable. However, progress is occurring to save the lives of mothers and babies all over the globe.

Maternal Health Issues

The World Health Organization (WHO) has a commitment to reaching maternal health goals and improving healthcare systems. It is reaching towards this by working with partners to address inequality of access to healthcare, researching all possible causes of maternal deaths and providing clinical and programmatic guidance and more.

 The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is a global leader in solving maternal health issues. It has a commitment to improving maternal, newborn and child healthcare services. In fact, it has partnered with governments to help meet the needs of mothers and babies with country-specific plans. USAID has saved the lives of over 340,000 mothers. It also protects the life of the mothers’ babies after delivery with immunization and sanitation resources available.

Merck for Mothers, or MOMs, is a global initiative that focuses on creating a world where no woman dies while giving birth. MOMs boasts helping over 13 million mothers deliver their babies safely. In addition, it also supports over 100 strategic investments aimed at programs that help the cause. Its focus countries are India, Nigeria, Kenya and the United States. It also has a global corporate grants program supporting nongovernmental organizations worldwide.

MOMs in India

India has a high maternal mortality rate of 145 deaths for every 100,000 births (56 highest of 182 countries in January 2020). MOMs focuses on supporting programs that help struggling mothers in India use technology. One such partnership is with USAID, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other organizations that work with the Alliance for Savings Mothers and Newborns (ASMAN) to digitally monitor the health of mothers during labor and delivery.

ASMAN provides links to healthcare providers for a Safe Delivery App – a smartphone application that shows “up-to-date clinical guidelines on obstetric care and can be used as an immediate life-saving reference during complicated deliveries.”

Solving delivery complications requires quick thinking and action on the spot, which is a MOMs specialty. The initiative utilizes MOMs’ resources to enhance already existing solutions. It creates a “failing fast” learning method to quickly get hands-on experience that can save lives.

An Indian digital health company, Avegen, has also partnered with MOMs to help release a web-based platform to educate women about quality maternal care. It gives them the ability to rate the services they receive on a public platform for others to read. This gives women the power to educate themselves and choose an accessible healthcare provider that meets their needs. It also gives healthcare providers the feedback they need to improve the quality of care.

MOMs in Africa

Developing nations such as Nigeria are more susceptible to maternal mortality and other delivery complications because of poor healthcare systems. Nigerian women are around 500 times more likely to die during childbirth compared to the most advanced nations. Nigeria’s high level of maternal mortality comes from a multitude of factors such as poverty, food insecurity and low healthcare resources.

Nigeria had the fourth highest maternal mortality rate in the world of 182 countries ranked in January 2020. In 2021, Merck reported it as the highest.

In Nigeria, health conditions like diabetes and hypertension are on the rise. These health risks can be precursors to eclampsia/preeclampsia, a high cause of maternal death. MOMs has a dedication to locating indirect causes of maternal mortality such as malaria and cardiovascular disease by partnering with Nigerian healthcare initiatives to identify how to manage these risks.

MOMs is bringing unidentified maternal death statistics to light by collaborating with Africare and Nigeria Health Watch to support an advocacy program, “Giving Birth in Nigeria.” The program lets communities report otherwise unreported maternal deaths online. Many maternal deaths do not get reported because they do not happen in hospitals or do not receive confirmation. However, communities need to understand why women in certain areas are at risk and how their deaths can undergo prevention.

MOMs began partnering with LifeBank, a technological healthcare supply distribution system based in Nigeria. LifeBank aims to bring much-needed medical supplies to patients quickly with a multi-modal transportation network. It has saved the lives of over 10,000 people and served 676 hospitals, with a focus on providing blood and other medical supplies to mothers during childbirth.

Continuing Maternal Health Success

MOMs provides service around the world to help mothers before, during and after pregnancy survive and live a healthy life with their babies. Measures can sometimes prevent the loss of a woman to maternal mortality, especially in impoverished countries. MOMs and its partners have been working to ensure that healthcare systems are more efficient, that women are empowered to share their experiences and to ensure that healthcare workers are up-to-date on childbirth procedures.

– Julia Ditmar
Photo: Flickr

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Johnson & Johnson’s Africa Innovation Challenge Celebrates Public Health Initiatives

africa innovation challenge“What’s New?” This is the question engraved on a medallion for the Dr. Paul Janssen Award for Biomedical Research. Johnson & Johnson (J&J) created the award in 2014 to honor Janssen, a prominent pharmaceutical researcher who passed away in 2003. Janssen would pose this two-word question daily to his research and development lab. Now, every year, the award is given to an innovative and passionate scientist or team of scientists alongside a $200,000 prize as part of J&J’s Africa Innovation Challenge.

The Africa Innovation Challenge

The challenge is part of J&J’s Champions of Science initiative. Seema Kumar, J&J’s vice president of innovation, global health and policy communication, explains that the initiative is designed to “champion science” because “science needs champions.” The 2016 launch of J&J’s Africa Innovation Challenge 1.0 was part of a geo-specific initiative to support scientific advancements in Africa. Such developments are key to improving healthcare in impoverished areas.

J&J sought applications from Africa-based entrepreneurs who were creating new healthcare services and products in “early childhood development and maternal health,” “empowering young girls” and “overall family well-being.” Winners received mentorship from J&J’s team of researchers, engineers and scientists as well as up to $100,000 in funding.

The Need for Innovation

Access to healthcare is often a hurdle throughout Africa. Twenty-seven of the world’s 28 poorest countries are located in Sub-Saharan Africa. As of 2015, the majority of the world’s poor reside in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the average poverty rate is 41%. In comparison, data from 2018 suggests that approximately 8.6% of the world’s population lives in extreme poverty.

With such high rates of poverty, it is estimated that less than 50% of Africans have access to modern healthcare facilities. In 2009, sub-Saharan Africa spent only 6.1% of its GDP on healthcare. For the majority of African countries, less than 10% of their GDP goes toward health expenditures. The continent consequently has the highest mortality rates in the world and is the sole continent in which deaths from chronic diseases are outnumbered by deaths from infectious diseases.

J&J’s Africa Innovation Challenge aims to alter these statistics and improve healthcare in Africa through science-based initiatives. After naming three Africa Innovation Challenge winners in 2017, J&J launched the Africa Innovation Challenge 2.0 in 2018. This time, the six challenge categories were “botanical solutions,” “packaging innovations,” “mental health,” “health worker support,” “digital health tools” and “essential surgical care.” J&J announced six winners, who each received up to $50,000 in funding. These are the nine companies that have won the Africa Innovation Challenge since its launch in 2016.

Winners of the Africa Innovation Challenge

  1. 2017 winner SaCoDé makes washable and re-wearable pads that tie around the waist for girls and women in Burundi. The pads prevent infection among the many Burundian women who cannot afford disposable pads. Since winning the Africa Innovation Challenge, SaCoDé has opened two new manufacturing locations and created jobs for 20 women in Burundi.
  2. 2017 winner Innov Asepsis makes hands-free faucets. There is an approximately 60% chance of contracting an infection from unclean faucet handles in Uganda, but these hands-free faucets reduce the risk of infection by eliminating contact. PedalTaps fit onto existing sinks to reduce the spread of diseases related to faucet handles.
  3. 2017 winner J-Palm is a makeup and skincare brand made from cold-pressed palm oil. Makeup products imported into Liberia are affordable and popular but are often made with chemicals that may be toxic. J-Palm addresses this issue by providing customers with affordable, safe makeup products. The company supports local farmers and has created 330 new jobs in Liberia.
  4. 2019 winner LifeBank is a digital platform with the goal of increasing safety, efficiency and efficacy in Nigeria’s blood supply chain. Approximately 8% to 14% of HIV cases in Nigeria are a consequence of poor safety and regulatory measures in the blood donation system. LifeBank works to deliver the necessary blood for transfusions to Nigerian hospitals in less than 45 minutes to improve the quality of the blood supply chain.
  5. 2019 winner The Hope Initiative uses a validated metric to measure “hope among nurses and mothers” in Rwanda and to “understand how hope intersects with healthcare worker burnout and perinatal health outcomes,” according to the J&J website. An estimated 50% of healthcare workers are classified as “high risk” for experiencing burnout. Based on demonstrated research that hope decreases burnout, The Hope Initiative’s goal is to diminish burnout among emergency care workers by identifying the “interventions that positively influence hope.”
  6. 2019 winner Dreet is a Botswanan phone application that uses hearing device tests and remotely connects children in rural Africa to healthcare professionals. Approximately 67% of the world’s hearing-impaired population resides in developing countries. The Dreet application helps families navigate life with a hearing-impaired child while working to mitigate high or unnecessary healthcare expenses.
  7. 2019 winner Crib A’ Glow is a “solar-powered, foldable phototherapy crib provided to hospitals, health centers and parents” in communities across Nigeria to treat infant jaundice, according to the J&J website. Infant jaundice most commonly occurs when babies’ livers have not matured sufficiently in order to remove a chemical compound called bilirubin from the bloodstream. An estimated 6 million babies worldwide do not receive treatment for jaundice. Left untreated, jaundice can cause hearing loss, developmental issues, cerebral palsy and, in some cases, death. Crib A’ Glow helps to give poor infants a chance.
  8. 2019 winner Uganics manufactures mosquito-repelling soap that is both affordable and organic. Africa has the world’s highest rates of malaria transmission. In 2018, the continent was home to 93% of the world’s malaria cases and 94% of malaria-related deaths. Sixty-seven percent of those deaths were children. Uganics’s soap helps prevent malaria from spreading in Uganda.
  9. 2019 winner M-SCAN aims to help pregnant women in rural Ugandan communities who do not have access to ultrasounds. The company’s device uses a portable probe and smartphone, laptop or tablet to perform ultrasounds. This device helps healthcare professionals and/or midwives prepare for any risks that may arise during delivery.

The winning companies, or “Champions of Science,” have helped increase healthcare access among Africa’s poor while also improving healthcare safety. Through J&J’s Africa Innovation Challenge, these sustainable solutions to public health problems have also created jobs, providing workers with stable incomes and helping boost countries’ economies. By expanding support and funding for public health innovations, companies, organizations and governments can continue to “champion” change.

– Zoe Engels
Photo: Flickr