Empower the Northern Frontier

This project entails the fusion of technology, expertise of medical personnel and the experience of traditional midwives in ensuring safe delivery in Samburu County.

Samburu County is located in Northern Kenya and is classified under the Arid and Semi Arid areas (ASAL). The residents are predominantly nomadic pastrolists who rear livestock as their primary source of livelihood.  Samburu County experiences approximately 362 deaths out of 1000 live births in a year. This is aggravated by poor road network, lack of skilled neo-natal care personnel, lack of well equipped maternities and insecurity. The way of life of the local population also offers little help to the situation. Samburu has the worst statistics in the entire nation. With the advent of devolution in 2013, Samburu County government invested heavily in building hospitals in remote areas and purchase of ambulances. Their was slight improvement but 7 years later the ambulances are grounded, hospitals lack essential facility and lowly motivated personnel man the institutions. This project recognizes the need to bridge this gap occasioned by above mentioned factors and bring health care closer to the poor people. The project proposed a sustainable, modern, innovative, pro-poor, community-based interventions that will link Samburu communities with the formal health system.

Different technologies have been evaluated and used as potential means to improve the health care. The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles including drones provides an effective solution. Drones are not limited by bad terrain or poor road network and are low cost, environmentally friendly solutions to the health problems of our time.

This programme intend to borrow the model adopted by Zipline, a US company that is delivering similar solutions in African countries including Rwanda. This project will use low cost, autonomous, fixed wing drones to deliver anti venoms, vaccines, blood, blood samples, and medicines to various hospitals across Samburu County and aid child deliveries with a hope of reducing mortality rate. The project intends to also work closely with traditional midwives and neo-natal care givers, train them on modern childbirth technologies and ensure their input into the health system is not ignored. Through partnership with the local authorities, this project will aim to equip maternity wards since most of them lack basic facilities. 

As stated earlier, Samburu is predominantly a pastoralist county with the locals practising nomadic pastrolism. The county is inhabited by Samburu and Turkana communities. Their way of lives involves them migrating from area to another in search of grass and water for their livestock's. This further strains the already stretched health care systems. Lack of investment, Development gaps occasioned by investors shutting down their operations due to insecurity further aggravates this matter. The County Government is clearly open to partnership and the County Health and Medical Team (CHMT) points out the area of maternal health as one that needs concerted efforts. The local communities holds their traditional midwives (to be referred as Community Health Workers) in high regard and any attempt to train, equip and upgrade their skills is a welcome addition and assistance to the local communities. Through this project, this organisation will be able to empower the Community Health Workers who can in turn provide health care services to the local mothers and even request for further help and have them delivered by our drones in even the remotest parts of the County.

This programme directly aims to solve the challenge of mother and child deaths in Samburu County a County that is leading in cases of maternal deaths in Kenya. The programme aims to fuse technology through use of autonomous drones to deliver key products required to ensure that our mother deliver safely. The project will also involve training of traditional midwives and caregivers to build their capacity so that they can be a key partner in solving this challenge.