The October, MIT D-Lab gathered entrepreneurs and entrepreneur supporters from East Africa and around the world in Mukono, Uganda, to apply a co-design approach to overcoming barriers to scale for entrepreneurs in East Africa.

Villgro Kenya’s Investment Manager Gibson Muriuki joined other stakeholders to take on the most urgent scaling challenge of entrepreneurs in the MIT D-Lab’s Scale-Ups Fellowship 2019 cohort.

clinicPesa, one of Villgro Kenya’s portfolio companies benefited from the six-day summit which took the teams through a design sprint to dig into the challenge, generate creative ideas for how to overcome it, and prototype and test the idea with relevant stakeholders.

[vc_row nav_skin=”light” consent_include=”include”][vc_column css_animation=””][vc_image_caption image=”199″ aspect_ratio=”4:3″ overlay_mobile=”yes” style=”style_1″ caption_appear=”caption_appear” skin=”light” radius=”0″ title=”Ilara Health Joins Villgro Kenya’s Porfolio” description=”” preloader=”” css_animation=””][vc_column_text]

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[vc_row nav_skin=”light” consent_include=”include”][vc_column css_animation=””][vc_image_caption image=”184″ aspect_ratio=”4:3″ overlay_mobile=”yes” style=”style_1″ caption_appear=”caption_appear” skin=”light” radius=”0″ title=”The health innovation Learning lab 2019″ description=”” preloader=”” css_animation=””][vc_column_text]Villgro Kenya in collaboration with the County Innovations Challenge Fund hosted the Health Innovation Learning Lab on June 11, 2019. The main objective was to examine lessons learnt from health innovation growth in Kenya, the drivers, enablers and best practices that support effective scaling up of low cost health innovations.

The meeting was structured around conversations with panels and keynote speeches of leading experts in innovative financing, health systems and the startup ecosystem.

The conversations were on Kenya’s health Innovation Ecosystem, Designing and delivering with scale in mind, Good practices for funding investments across the scaling pathway and pathways for scaling health innovations.

Challenges innovators face to scale came up with finance being the biggest hurdle People tend to undermine the financing of healthcare because it’s looked at as a social value and not an economic value, yet health affects the economy.

Innovations require innovative funding and patience capital. Funding needs change as the innovation progresses along the pathway towards scale.

Dr. Sam Gwer of Afya Research Africa pointed out the gap between innovators who are not good at grant writing and funders,

“Opportunities are skewed towards those who can write good grants this locks out innovators with great products who are not in a position to do the same.”

Challenges in sustaining health innovations abound and designers of programs should plan with sustainability in mind. Innovations require innovative funding and patient capital to scale, this can be enhanced by high value private public partnerships.

On scaling innovations, panelists pointed out that replicating and adapting health innovations helps scale impact. This must however start from the design process, you can think about an innovation but if it is not sustainable and scalable then it is not ready. Innovators were also encouraged to think not only about problem solution fit but also problem market fit.

High value partnerships with the private and public sectors can open up a path to scale. In Kenya, public-private partnerships remain largely untapped as a source of support for innovations in healthcare.

The need for the private sector, government and academia to work together to provide solutions to challenges also came up.

Dr. Robert Karanja mentioned the need to change the mindsets of students in STEM to move from seeing academia as their obvious career path and instead transform them into applying their STEM skills into solving Kenya’s challenges.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Villgro Kenya is excited to announce funding and incubation support for Maisha Meds and Turaco, two companies working to improve health access for low income Kenyans.

Maisha Meds, a software platform for ensuring that rural pharmacists and clinicians effectively purchase quality affordable medicines and pass on subsidies to patients, received $40,000 in grant funding from Villgro Kenya. The funding comes with mentorship and technical expertise to develop their business model and scale.

The system provides rural patients who often visit local pharmacies first for basic care with quality and affordable drugs purchased through the Maisha Meds platform. This helps tackle the challenge of market access for pharmaceutical companies and providers, ensuring that high quality medicines are affordable by patients and that counterfeit and substandard medicines are excluded from the supply chain.

Speaking on the Maisha Meds innovation, Moses Waweru, Senior Programs Manager at Villgro Kenya mentioned the platform relieves patients of the burden of purchasing expensive medicine while ensuring quality care. Pharmacies will also be able to make smart orders using sales data generated from the system and take stock of their inventory and sales.

Jessica Vernon, Maisha Meds CEO expressed her excitement to join Villgro Kenya’s incubation program saying, “The mission of Maisha Meds is to develop systems to improve access to high quality and affordable medicines.  We are incredibly excited to work with Villgro in this mission, and have heard wonderful things about the support that Villgro provides companies working to scale health technologies in East Africa.”

Turaco which offers health loans bundled with insurance so their clients can get care whenever a medical emergency arises also received $40, 000 in grant funding from Villgro Kenya.

“Turaco is changing the game in healthcare financing for emerging consumers. We are thrilled to have the support of Villgro to launch our innovative insurance and health loan products in Kenya and Uganda.” Said Ted Pantone Turaco – Co-founder & CEO.

“Finding sufficient money to pay for healthcare is a major problem for a big part of society, which causes many people to delay seeking treatment until their condition is more advanced, and more expensive to treat. At worst healthcare costs are a primary factor pushing people back into poverty. We’re excited about Turaco’s experienced team, and innovative and scalable approach to solving this problem.” Paul Belknap, Villgro Kenya’s COO stated.

Villgro Kenya commits to supporting East African based health start-ups with seed funding, customized guidance for start-ups to scale and access to industry experts and stakeholders for product development, market knowledge and downstream investors.

Ms. Olivia Koburongo, the founder of Mama Ope has been named a 2018 Pneumonia Champion by Just Actions. Through their innovative pneumonia screening jacket they aim to equip health workers in low resource areas to effectively screen children under the age of 5 for pneumonia symptoms.

“The problem we’re trying to solve is diagnosing pneumonia at an early stage before it gets severe and we’re also trying to solve the problem of not enough manpower in hospitals because currently we have a doctor to patient ratio which is one to 24,000 in the country,” said Koburongo

Sub-saharan Africa accounts for half of pnuemonia deaths among children under the age of five world wide, According to the UN children’s agency UNICEF, the severe lung infection kills up to 24,000 Ugandan children under the age of five per year.

It is normally misdiagnosed with malaria, asthma and tuberculosis. These diseases have many signs in common and there is need to clearly differentiate them. Lack of a clear differentiation between viral and bacterial pneumonia during diagnosis leads to wrong administration of drugs especially antibiotics which creates resistance.

Screening of the patient using the Mama Ope innovation will help reduce resistance to antibiotics and the number of deaths that occur from pneumonia.