Jacaranda Named Winner of 2021 Amazon Web Services Imagine Grant
— PRESS RELEASE —
Kenya-based non-profit Jacaranda Health has been selected as a winner of the 2021 Amazon Web Services (AWS) Imagine Grant, a public grant opportunity celebrating the innovative use of cloud technology to accelerate impact in local and global communities.
Nairobi, Kenya – One of the most significant drivers of maternal deaths in Kenya (~30%) is that women are not empowered or informed to seek care at the appropriate time. Over the next two years, Jacaranda will work with AWS to rapidly scale its low-cost digital health tool - PROMPTS - to transform the health seeking behaviors of 1.5 million expectant and new mothers across Kenya, and wider sub Saharan Africa.
The AI-enabled SMS platform has already shifted key behaviors related to better health outcomes; women using PROMPTS are 22% more likely to achieve the recommended 4+ prenatal care visits, and 1.6x more likely to take up family planning services. It does this through a combined approach, sending mothers gestation-stage specific messages with pregnancy and postpartum advice, alongside a two-way helpdesk service which triages and responds to thousands of incoming messages from mums daily in English or Swahili. It also uses machine learning to flag messages for clinical danger signs, allowing helpdesk agents to refer urgent cases for care in minutes.
PROMPTS is built on open-source digital goods and low-cost systems to ensure its adoption and scalability within resource-constrained government health systems. The AWS grant will support Jacaranda’s ambition to sustainably run the platform at national scale, improving health outcomes for 1.5 million women and accounting for 60% of the births in Kenya. AWS cloud services will increase visibility of how PROMPTS impacts key health indicators like family planning uptake, and improve analytics to offer real-time, responsive data to nurses and health system managers to more effectively respond to systemic weaknesses in care quality in public facilities.
“Thanks to this AWS grant, we’re in a strong position to rapidly scale our locally-developed solutions to transform health outcomes for more mothers and babies, in Kenya and beyond. Strengthening our existing technology is integral to this future growth, and doing this in a way that is both cost-efficient and context-specific, will ensure the sustainability of our programs as a longer-term national resource.”
Jacaranda was named a winner in the Momentum to Modernize category which recognizes foundational technology projects, and will receive up to $30,000 in unrestricted funding, up to $10,000 in AWS Promotional Credits, and project implementation support. Proposals were judged on several factors including the innovative and unique nature of the project, impact on mission-critical goals, and clearly defined outcomes and milestones.
About Jacaranda Health
Jacaranda Health is a Kenya-based non-profit that works to improve maternal and newborn health (MNH) care in public government facilities, where the majority of underserved women deliver their babies. In Kenya, it partners with the National Ministry of Health and with 20 Kenyan County Governments to deploy affordable, scalable, and tech-enabled solutions across 1,000+ hospitals and health centers.
It’s package of two proven interventions, a SMS-based digital health tool PROMPTS and an innovative Nurse Mentorship program, address the two largest causes of maternal death - low health seeking behaviour and lack of emergency obstetric skills amongst providers - and improve care quality for mothers at public hospitals. Both solutions are low cost, tech-enabled, and co-designed with governments so they can be sustainably scaled within resource-constrained government health systems.
Building on its current scale, technology infrastructure, and national and private sector partnerships, Jacaranda is now working to scale its solutions to a critical mass of public hospitals, setting the stage for sustained change in the quality of MNH care, and achieving a central vision; a world where all women and their families experience childbirth safely and with dignity, and all newborns get a safe start in life.
About the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Imagine Grant Program
Since the launch of the Imagine Grant program in 2018, AWS has awarded over $4.5M in unrestricted funds, AWS Promotional Credits, and AWS training support to 46 nonprofit organizations in support of their technology-driven goals. Previous winners are currently using AWS services to tackle critical challenges such as finding a cure for Type 1 Diabetes by leveraging the power of data, tackling conservation issues at scale with machine learning, helping the military and Veteran community access resources faster and more reliably, and more.
“AWS was incredibly inspired by the innovative thinking we saw in the applications received this year. All of the nonprofits share a commitment to solving some of our world’s biggest challenges,” said Dave Levy, Vice President of Nonprofits, Healthcare, and U.S. Government at AWS. “We look forward to collaborating with our winners to help them build and reinvent new and existing cloud-based solutions that will make a meaningful impact on communities worldwide.”
Over 35,000 nonprofit organizations worldwide use AWS to increase their impact and advance mission goals. Through multiple programs tailored specifically to the nonprofit community, AWS can enable nonprofits of all sizes to overcome barriers to technology adoption, while enhancing the scale, performance, and capabilities of mission operations.
Press Enquiries: Laura Wotton, lwotton@jacarandahealth.org, Head of Global Communications, Jacaranda Health