Short solution summary:
Deploying a real-time Artificial Intelligence driven disease surveillance digital platform that instantly forecasts, detects and recommends effective strategies and actions needed to efficiently respond to, and limit further transmissions of current and future pandemics or crises.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team based?
Kampala, UgandaWho is the Team Lead for your solution?
Joseph Mulabbi
Which Challenge Area does your solution most closely address?
Respond (Decrease transmission & spread), such as: Optimal preventive interventions & uptake maximization, Cutting through “infodemic” & enabling better response, Data-driven learnings for increased efficacy of interventionsWhat specific problem are you solving?
Health security is defined by how well a country is prepared to deal with health-related threats. SARS, MERS, Swine Flu, HIV, COVID-19 - all of these viruses are zoonotic. They spillover from animals to humans. Part of the problem is what we eat, and how we raise animals for eating. Livestock owners are not veterinarians, but they know when animals are sick. They also know that one sick pig can easily equal twenty sick animals if they don’t keep the animal from the others. However, they might not know that twenty sick animals can turn into 5 million people infected in a deadly pandemic. Since the livestock owner most likely won’t share that they have a sick pig with local epidemiologists or community officials, the opportunity to stop a pandemic before it happens has been squandered. WHO describes vulnerability as lack of well-developed systems and states that most of the African region doesn’t have strong health systems, and mostly relies on Governments and donors as the primary funders of healthcare systems that serve over 70% of the 1.3 billion population. With these actors barely covering crucial budgets, their ability to efficiently anticipate, adequately prepare and deploy resources to respond to health threats is a life and death act. The announcement of a single COVID-19 case meant rapidly availing more than 10 products that may take a month or two to ship. The pandemic has revealed the significance of supply-chains preparedness in combating pandemics. We have seen core operations such as disease surveillance and procurement of essential products being greatly disrupted during the crisis. An increasing number of healthcare facilities have already faced significant disruption limiting their propensity to provide access to other essential services e.g. HIV and malaria treatment. These trends could have been better managed with efficient supply practices.
Who does your solution serve, and what needs of theirs does it address?
On the one hand, our solution is developed to support the operations of actors working to ensure health security and resilience. These include government agencies, donor organizations, medical institutions and supply chain actors (manufacturers, buyers, suppliers, financiers) - critical to the availability of essential healthcare products in the country. Lack of supplies due to inefficiencies in the supply chain processes ultimately negates the health of the population that depend on government and institutional bodies to provide subsidized medicines such as ARV’s. We approximate 80% of the population in Africa to be beneficiaries of the platform.
Additionally, according to Uganda Animal husbandry report 2019, 75% of confirmed poultry outbreaks were contained within the community of origin, and the remaining 25% contained within neighboring communities before further spread. In one instance, an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in domestic livestock was rapidly contained and estimated to have saved the local economy approximately $5 million dollars. Farmers and livestock owners are part of the immediate Tiktym beneficiaries, as they receive immediate recommended actions for their sick animals as well as advise from expert veterinarian care for their animals. They also protect the rest of their livestock as the animals are typically quarantined for further examination. Local health officials - in particular epidemiological experts - whose responsibility it is to monitor possible outbreaks, receive considerably more relevant data to better do their jobs. They are able to monitor the status of sick animals in real-time from their offices as farmers take pictures and upload them to our system. Lastly, the greater local communities are the longer-term beneficiaries as they are protected from potentially deadly outbreaks.
What is your solution’s stage of development?
Proof of Concept: A venture or organisation building and testing its prototype, research, product, service, or business/policy model, and has built preliminary evidence or dataPlease select all the technologies currently used in your solution:
What “public good” does your solution provide?
We shall develop an mHealth platform that majority of citizens who live in remote areas with limited access to data networks and with few possessions except one, the cellphone can access without any barriers of entry. It will work on any cellphone (even the most basic without Internet) through USSD and will be free of charge, available on all national telecom operators 24/7, works on any cellphone, and even works in areas with no data network. Through this menu-like interactive structure, our multi-channel and bi-directional platform will deliver pertinent MOH-approved health information, will collect & answer users' questions, perform surveys/self-screening, and avail on the back-end access to anonymized and geo-referenced data/usage reports for the MOH and partners to help stay informed on what issues affect citizens in different areas of the country, to help guide decisions and policies.
Additionally, while a user can get the latest information on preventive disease/Covid19 measures or contact details for the nearest health facility, they can also subscribe to receive notifications of particular health topics, submit health questions, receive SMS campaigns on important health issues, etc.
This cloud-based and modular platform will easily be translated and extended to other countries.
How will your solution create tangible impact, and for whom?
The solution is developed to support the operations of actors working to ensure health security and resilience. These include government agencies, donor organizations, medical institutions, supply chain actors, farmers and livestock owners,
local health officials and local communities. When you empower local communities with the technology to solve problems themselves, they care more about those issues. Our theory of change is that giving local communities tools to monitor the health of their livestock is the best way to stop pandemics before they spillover into humans.
More, Tiktym provides community volunteers with technology to monitor the health of their livestock, and the community volunteers provide local health officials with real-time epidemiological data. The immediate output of this symbiotic relationship is the livestock owner receiving medical care for their animal, and the health official receiving just-in-time data directly from the source of a potential outbreak. The longer-term outcome of the Tiktym system is fewer full-blown outbreaks because local health authorities are able to respond rapidly before it spreads to nearby areas. Fewer animal pandemics lowers the likelihood of human pandemics, as the pandemic spread is stopped at the animal level.
Based on feedback from the proof-of-concept survey, Tiktym was perceived as useful application for enhancing early reporting of clinical manifestations suggestive of EVD at community level by empowering community leaders and farmers save time and money while at the same time positively responding to and limiting the transmission of diseases from one animal to another which would overspill to persons-thus saving life too. In addition, the tool was found to reduce the workload and other challenges associated with paper-based system.
As the COVID-19 global health crisis has demonstrated, health care
systems need to think proactively about how to prevent and manage
pandemics. Tiktym is a low-cost solution that can reach a wide
audience, give access to healthcare resources, and ultimately provide a
path to avoiding future outbreaks.
How will you scale your impact over the next one year and the next three years?
In the next year, our goal is to have Tiktym coverage for every district in Uganda (135 in total) and train over 50,000 "disease detective" volunteers, scale the business and expand into Kenya, Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria, and impact at least 20 Million people.
In the next 5 years, 250 Million people in the next 5 years across Africa, transform our platform to a sector agnostic platform that will greatly and efficiently improve procurement in at least 30 other countries in Africa as well as have Tiktym implementations in several other countries, including South Africa, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Senegal, DR. Congo, Liberia, etc.
We will also seek partnership with both local and global agencies such as USAID, African Union Disease Surveillance Task Force, World Health Organization, Global Health Alliance, Microsoft, Gates Foundation and related NGOs. Look to form technical partnerships with institutions like MIT, and other organizations working in this space.
It is our anticipation that by partnering with such NGOs and governments will help us connect to new markets and we shall get the right mentorship for funding and business development as we shall seek to scale our model and products to multiple geographies and markets.
How are you measuring success against your impact goals?
Using our experienced team of project monitoring and evaluation experts, we are constantly relying on the monthly feedback online surveys for all our stakeholders (NGOs, governments, healthcare actors, local communities, livestock farmers) etc., as well as consider the number of people directly impacted by our solution.
We are also considering the potential of the project to attract a good number of partners both locally and globally who are willing to share in our project vision and help us scale the project to new markets across the African continent.
Soon we shall be able to measure project success based on the number of local and international awards, as well as number of grants and donations raised.
Lastly but not list, we are paying a keen eye on the rate of the platform's effectiveness to provide real-time insights and forecast emerging crises and needs to enhance preparedness and responsiveness, trigger and prescribe actions to efficiently plan, move, and manage supplies in response to current and future health crises.
In which countries do you currently operate?
In which countries do you plan to deploy your solution within the next 3 years?
What barriers currently exist for you to accomplish your goals in the next year and the next 3 years? How do you plan to overcome these barriers?
As we work to resolve a health security problem, we are cognizant of a few key cultural perceptions, technical and resource barriers we need to address. Our solution collects data and learns from it to automate operations and enable resource optimization in a process that has traditionally been manual. In doing so, there is a perception that our digitization of these operations will render certain job functions obsolete. For our solution to provide process visibility and intelligence on product and disease surveillance, our system needs constant real time data. And due to the nature of data we process, we also need to be mindful of data security management concerns, particularly where and how the data is housed. In order to meet market demands and evolve the product to scale the business, we need additional resources, including capital, human and networks.
The good news is that we have put in a number of measures in place to address cultural perceptions, technical and resource barriers. We plan on providing continuous support to our key actors to ease concerns of job security as a result of digitization and process automation. We designed the solution to provide a 360 view of most value-chain related activities which enhances visibility and collaboration amongst actors.
To ensure the constant flow of real time data, we have provisioned for API integration with our partners. All data collected from our partners is used and stored in line with strict data governance laws and regulations set out locally and internationally.
We are actively engaging with suitable potential investors to be able to meet our capital requirements. For the human resources required, we are constantly on the lookout for talent that fits within our product evolution requirements.
To evaluate the effectiveness of control and preventative health measures across Africa, we need to grow our network; as such, we have partnered with different local and international institutions.
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What type of organisation is your solution team?
Hybrid of for-profit and nonprofitList any organisations that you are formally affiliated with or working for
1. ArqLite Green,
2. LivingStone International University
3. Living Water Ministries Uganda
4. Expert Boda
5. Waiba Health Services
Why are you applying to The Trinity Challenge?
The reason we are applying to The Trinity Challenge is for access to the community of peers, funders, experts, professors and partners who can help us advance Tiktym by providing mentorship and exposure to the greater The Trinity Challenge network. The Trinity Challenge opens doors to conversations inaccessible to the average social enterprise. We need mentorship from The Trinity Challenge community of public health experts, epidemiologists, and technologists on how to scale our technology nationally and beyond Uganda.
We also want to join a supportive community of like-minded entrepreneurs and solvers whom we can learn from, grow together and refine our approach to enhance health security planning and building resilience across Africa. We believe this extended network of peers and potential partners will allow us to create a catalytic effect that will accelerate our growth and network which in effect accelerates development efforts in enhancing Africa’s state of health security.
What organisations would you like to partner with, why, and how would you like to partner with them?
We are looking for partners who can enhance our effort to reach our fundraising goals for the next one year, expand our network more so with government agencies, donor and development organizations, enhance our market access and brand visibility or sign up as knowledge partners to help us grow our industry experience and Connections to mentors and influencers with extensive networks across Africa and in other developing economies.
Tiktym aims to develop partnerships with MIT to connect with mentors, experts and advisors to build and expand our solution by integrating AI into our existing solution thereby gaining consumer insights, integrating predictive algorithms and supporting our research processes.
In addition, we aspire to build partnerships with tech giants such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook to access cloud computing, Telemonitoring through wearables, customer data acquisition and artificial intelligence resources,
Partnership Goals:
(1) Scale Up – We aspire to build consortiums at National and international level to build synergies for sustainable development. We are looking for partners who can match their resources with ours to scale our solution, gain new active users and maximize utilization of our services to a greater number of beneficiaries that may be beyond our reach at the moment.
(2) Strategic Development: We are actively seeking support to improvise the business development strategies.
(3) Technological Support: We are looking for synergies that help us integrate machine learning and AI in our existing technology while improving our interface for better user experience and engagement.
(4) Human Resource management – We are looking for a network of
doctors and specialists across the globe that will be interested to
utilize our solution to continue their medical practice.
- Business strategy expertise to pivot Tiktym's model from a localized community project to a country/region-agnostic product/business
- Partnerships with NGOs and governments to connect to new markets
- Mentorship for funding and business development as Tiktym scales its model and products to multiple geographies and markets
- Partners to join fundraising rounds or enhance fundraising success, both through investment and grants
- Experts in health supply chain management interested in joining Tiktym’s advisory board
- Mentorship or advice on building an organizational PR & marketing strategy
- Opportunities for exposure and exchange of thought process around use of technology & AI in Africa’s health security planning.
Over 600 provincial livestock officers, public health officers, health professionals, economists, political scientists, and provincial government officials.
Solution Team
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Mr. Joseph Mulabbi Founder & CEO, RefuConnect
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Solution name:
Tiktym