In 2017, we at Concern Worldwide US are launching The Centre for Innovations and Health, an initiative that will seek to leverage our presence in developing countries to test and scale promising solutions that have high potential to improve the lives of the extreme poor.
 

Since 1968, we have helped pilot and scale new approaches to helping this vulnerable group. Examples include our lead role in the transformation in the treatment of acute child malnutrition through the Community Management of Acute Malnutrition (CMAM) approach, our early pilots in mobile emergency cash transfers, and, beginning in 2009, the Innovations for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health initiative, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
 

That funding catalyzed the development and testing of creative solutions for improving the health and survival of mothers, babies, and children. Community engagement in the design process to ensure consistency with need was key, and new ideas were sharpened with input from relevant experts, then refined until programs were ready to be tried on a pilot basis. In India, Sierra Leone, Malawi, Kenya, and Ghana, this process yielded pilots that were tested, scaled, and in many cases integrated into ongoing responses by Concern, other NGOs, governments, and institutional partners.
 

The Maker Movement for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health in Kenya is one such example.  
 

The newborn unit in Nairobi’s Kenyatta National Hospital, the country’s largest, is a busy place and skilled staff members do all they can with overstretched resources, including a lack of functioning medical equipment. Babies – often as many as three – routinely share incubators, increasing infection risk.  
 

A critical shortage of working medical equipment is one reason why so many women and babies cannot receive the health care services they need for a healthy pregnancy and childbirth, resulting in needless deaths in developing countries, including Kenya. While Kenya has made progress in reducing preventable deaths of mothers and newborns, it stands among the top ten countries with the highest numbers of women dying from pregnancy and childbirth complications, according to a United Nations report. Because of the shortages and the sheer volume of patients, vital equipment such as oxygen machines and incubators are being overused and are breaking down.
 

Often, because spare parts are hard to come by, the expensive and usually imported devices are never fully repaired or remain broken altogether. 
 

Over the last three years, the Maker project has drawn from local skills and expertise to tackle the problem. Through a partnership between the University of Nairobi and Kenyatta National Hospital, university engineers and students have teamed up with maternity ward doctors, nurses, and biomedical engineers to design high-quality, affordable medical devices better suited for local needs.
 

From the initial nine devices found to be most needed, Maker prioritized and designed three: an examination light, a suction machine to remove fluids from a newborn’s airways, and a phototherapy machine for treating newborns with jaundice. After developing and refining multiple versions of the suction machine, the Kenya Bureau of Standards approved it for testing in a clinical setting.
 

Maker also provided a calibration center for repairing hospital devices and a brand new lab on campus stocked with equipment for designing and prototyping devices.
Concern Worldwide and our partners launched the new Maker Space in the university’s Science and Technology Park on June 29, 2016 at a celebratory event that included a panel and speakers from the Ministry of Health, UNICEF, and even Kenyan singer/song writer, entrepreneur and women’s advocate Wahu Kagwi, who was appointed Maker’s Goodwill Ambassador.  
 

The program taps Kenya’s reputation as the hub of excellence and innovation in technology on the African continent with a strong network of skilled and entrepreneurial engineers and youth.
 

Maker’s success since its 2014 launch has led to a new partnership between Concern Worldwide, UNICEF, the Philips Foundation, and Gearbox called the Maternal and Newborn Health Innovations Project. This will enable Maker to move in 2016 from a pilot within our Innovations for Maternal, Newborn & Health initiative into a thriving, ongoing Concern program to locally design, on a much wider scale, a range of devices for Kenya’s mothers and babies.
 

Key to this process, which sees engineers, students, and teachers visit the hospital and nurses visit the design lab, is finding out what the users of the machines — the maternity ward clinicians themselves — want and need.  
 

And it’s about tapping local talent and expertise to meet these challenges.
Dr. Edwin Mbugua Maina, Concern Worldwide’s Senior Program Manager for Maker, sums it up: “We are working to save the lives of thousands of women and babies, and we can’t do it without engaging the health care workers who will be there, in that moment using the equipment we’re creating,” Maina said. “Because local problems need local solutions.”
 

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The Centre for Innovations and Health signals our commitment to working with partners across various sectors – including health, technology, business, and development, among others – toward reaching these types of transformational outcomes.  The Chicago Council on Global Affairs will be an essential partner given our shared focus on innovation for healthy futures, developing the next generation of innovative leaders, with special emphasis on women’s health.