33 million shillings up for grabs for the best innovation
By our reporter
According latest WHO statistics , Maternal mortality in Uganda remains one of the highest in the world, at 440 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. Most of these deaths are result of teenage pregnancy and lack of access of essential medicine among others.
A number of efforts have been made by stakeholders in the area of sexual and reproductive health to improve healthcare planning and delivery using electronic medical record systems and data aggregation platforms.
There also been efforts to improve access to pharmaceuticals and supplies in the area of maternal health in Uganda.
However, more opportunities still exist to further improve healthcare delivery using open data. Open data is any kind of data made available by a business, organization or individual that is freely available for the public to use, analyze and republish.
Significant challenges also still exist for the distribution of Essential Medicines and Health Supplies (EMHS) in maternal health that include among others human resource constraints (adequacy, distribution disparities and skill gaps); communication breakdown between communities, health facilities, district health offices and the central level which leads to poor planning and forecasting; communities not utilizing the reproductive health services put in place; lack or limited access to supplies and consumables; and abuse of the referral systems.
As such, United Nations Population Fund [UNFPA] in collaboration with , a local business incubator have launched a health-based innovation accelerator dubbed ‘Up Accelerate.’ calling on youth to develop solutions that can improve access to maternal health pharmaceuticals and supplies in Uganda.
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The program seeks to explore new and engaging ways to tackle pressing sexual and reproductive health (SRH) challenges in Uganda while promoting social entrepreneurship among young people.
Successful candidates will receive mentorship and training on financial modeling, team composition, building products, user-centered design, business growth and interact with domain experts. Accelerate will also offer lucky candidates seed funding of up to USD 10,000.
Potential opportunity areas
Potential opportunity areas for solution include, but not limited to : Improve accountability systems right from suppliers to prescription and dispensing; Improve information flow between expectant mothers, communities and health facilities to drive demand and utilization of available maternal services in their local communities thus reducing delays and supporting in planning processes; Use of data to improve forecasting of essential medicines and health supply needs within communities and public health facilities; Improve data management and monitoring systems at health facilities; and Improve human resource distribution, skilling and accountability.
The opportunity area in sexual reproductive areas include: Tools to enable individuals choose and locate health services thus reducing delays; Tools to enable participatory and citizen involvement in health service delivery
The other areas include: tools to track customer service & patient satisfaction; Accountability on service provision like cost of medicines; as well as Linking management information systems together to track individual access to services, identify pockets of need and response.
For details visit: http://upaccelerate.co.ug
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