This post was written by SEAD East Africa Project Associate Sylvia Sable. For more information about upcoming events and how you can benefit from these learning opportunities, please contact Patricia Odero (patricia.odero@duke.edu) or Sylvia Sable (sylvia.sable@duke.edu).

Coming up on the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, there is much to be learned from the way communities braced for and bounced back from this natural disaster that can help communities facing similar vulnerabilities abroad.

Today researchers from Tulane University in New Orleans, Stanford University, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and the Disease Resilience Leadership Academy are working closely with a consortium of universities across Africa led by Makerere University to better understand the factors that make African communities resilient in the face of major challenges such as climate change, security, and diseases like HIV.

What they’ve learned has been summarized in the first State of African Resilience Report published by the Resilience Africa Network, a USAID HESN initiative being led by Makerere University out of Kampala, Uganda, helping to better understand the factors that make a community resilient and inform development policy. Makerere and partners have created a formula for community resilience by identifying pathways to resilience and the innovations needed along this path to create appropriate community-driven solutions and policies to address some of the world’s most arduous problems.

This report offers a framework for designing innovations based on needs and policies defined by the community. Researchers led by Makerere University used new methods to understand resilience in a scientifically sound manner. It was little surprise to us that across all regions results showed that community partners consistently identified health and healthcare as a key factor to community resilience.  In fact, this research was also able to identify the types of healthcare innovations that would most likely contribute to community resilience including those that:

1. Address quality of care
2. Create catalytic networks of health ecosystem players including providers, patients, and financers for better health, and
3. Make diagnosis easier

At SEAD we are supporting and curating healthcare innovators in East Africa that address some of these pain points. LifeNet International works with faith-based clinics in Burundi and Uganda providing clinical and management training that increases the quality of care and capacity of clinics to treat patients. MicroClinic Technologies designed a clinic management system, ZiDi, that allows clinics to engage with health ecosystem players such as payers/insurers, pharmaceutical companies, and drug distributors for pooled drug procurement. Afya Research Africa has created a network of 12 self-sustaining rural clinics across Kenya and Safe Water and AIDS Project (SWAP) created a rural health product distribution network in Kenya using community health promoters to deliver products and health education door-to-door. Finally, we are seeing a number of interesting easy-to-use diagnostic tools being developed by innovators in East Africa. Matibabu, a technology that allows care providers to accurately diagnose malaria without the need for blood samples or a laboratory, is one such example.

With so many relevant examples of healthcare innovation in East Africa, the SEAD East Africa team will continue to attend and host events intended to bring together both the SEAD network and non-network healthcare innovators for increased peer-to-peer learning and knowledge exchange.

On April 3rd, mHealth@Duke help their inaugural Shark Tank competition, of which SEAD was a sponsor. Students competed to share their mHealth ideas and the chance to win funding and consulting to bring their apps to fruition. The following article was written by Julia Vail of the Duke Center for International Development on the winning team of the competition. You can find the original article here.

Preeti Prabhu, a fellow in the Master of International Development Policy (MIDP) program, was part of the winning team in the mHealth@Duke Shark Tank competition held Friday, April 3.

Other team members were Parth Chodavadia, a junior majoring in neuroscience and global health, and Suhani Jalota, a junior majoring in economics and global health. Jalota is also the daughter of MIDP and Rotary alumnus Rajiv Jalota.

The Shark Tank competition was designed bymHealth@Duke and the Duke Global Digital Health Science Center to provide a platform for the Duke University community to share innovative ideas in mobile health (mHealth) or digital health. The winning team’s idea was the development of a mobile app to standardize processes for rape victims in India.

The app provides a step-by-step guide for health care providers conducting medical examinations on rape victims. It also prompts them to refer the victims to mental health specialists and gynecologists following the consultation.  

“The issue of rape has always been close to our hearts, but the trigger was an episode of a television show that highlighted cases of girls going to hospitals after sexual assault and being turned away,” Prabhu said. “We realized that it is high time that we look at the after-rape situation through a medical lens to treat rather than ignore obvious injuries and hidden mental trauma.”

The app is designed specifically for countries where there are weak or inconsistent protocols for providing care to rape victims.

“A girl should have the security to know that the kind of treatment she would receive would be similar across hospitals,” Jalota said. “A single doctor should not decide the protocol to use or not to.” 

Health care providers would enter basic information into the app, such as the victim’s age and the location where the crime took place. The app would keep track of rape cases on a daily basis, forming weekly and monthly reports on the number of patients coming to see health professionals.  

“This will help form a database of the locations of rape cases seen by doctors, where a patient is more likely to go after a rape rather than a police station,” Prabhu said.

The winning team receives $500 and access to content experts, startup consultants and software engineers to help launch the app. After conducting additional research, the team plans to pilot the app at two public hospitals in Mumbai. 

Seven teams submitted applications for the Shark Tank competition. These teams were made up of Duke undergraduates; graduate students in medicine, business, environmental studies and public policy; and faculty and staff at the School of Medicine. The other two finalists designed apps to help medical supervisors give better feedback to their students and to help people learn cognitive behavioral therapy skills.