OVI Healthcare

The problem we are working to solve is the lack of primary healthcare and hospital services for vulnerable children. This lack of essential health access leads to a high number of preventable child deaths, abandonments, and unnecessary institutionalization in orphanages. In our work in communities in Kenya, we see firsthand the consequences that this lack of care can have on a child's life. 

The scale of the problem is enormous. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, there are an estimated 55 million orphaned children, most of whom live in extreme poverty. And globally, an estimated 153 million orphans have lost one or both parents (Unicef). 

In December 2021, Unicef reported that on current trends, more than 48 million children ages 0-5 years will die before 2030. More than half of these deaths – 57 percent – will occur in Sub-Saharan Africa (28 million), with another 25 percent occurring in Southern Asia (12 million). 

The factors that relate to our solution are the high number of preventable child deaths and the overuse of orphanages to care for emotionally and medically fragile children. The main reason that so many children die is that they don't have access to essential medical care. And the main reason that so many children end up in orphanages is that their families can't afford to care for them. Our solution provides essential medical care to at-risk children and keeps them out of orphanages and separated from their families.

OVI is a healthcare solution that combines treatment, advocacy, and predictive analytics to protect vulnerable children from the dangers of sickness, abandonment, neglect, and unnecessary institutionalization in orphanages. 

As a solution, we host remote medical camps, provide donor-sponsored primary care, and operate a full-service hospital for socially and medically vulnerable children. Our team also uses its innovative Child Vitality Index (CVI), which helps identify at-risk children and keep them healthy and safe. 

The CVI combines healthcare and technology that uses predictive analytics to improve primary healthcare performance. It incorporates inclusive human-centered design to ensure that it is better and complementary to existing methods in low- and middle-income countries. 

Our vision at OVI is for every child to grow up in a loving home where they can thrive. The data collected by our OVI Children's Hospital medical team in Migori, Kenya, can be shared with our local police departments, child officers, community leaders, orphanages, and NGOs. These findings also help support meaningful legislative action for child health.

At scale, our model at OVI and the Child Vitality Index can help improve the performance of primary healthcare and child protection services in Sub-Saharan Africa and low- and middle-income countries worldwide. 

The target population of our solution is socially and medically vulnerable children in developing countries who are at risk of becoming critically ill or institutionalized in orphanages. Our solution provides increased access to primary care and hospital services for these children. It scales the use of our innovative Child Vitality Index (CVI) solution, which helps identify at-risk children and keep them healthy and safe. This approach will improve the lives of these children by providing them with the necessary visibility, healthcare, and protection they need to thrive.

The OVI Children's Hospital is 100% locally staffed with 50+ Kenyan medical professionals and support staff who intimately understand the need for primary care and hospital services for our community's socially and medically vulnerable children. We deeply resonate and empathize with the unique hardships impacting individuals in developing countries and are committed to finding innovative solutions.

Our efforts have attracted valuable insights and support from world leaders in our five years of operation. Namely, we have shared meetings with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus, and Kenyan philanthropist Sarah Obama. Most recently, Ida Odinga, wife to our former Kenyan prime minister and current presidential candidate Raila Odinga, has become an avid supporter of our work and has publicly endorsed and visited our hospital on multiple occasions. 

Foremost, we are constantly engaging with local community members, leaders, and child protection entities to understand the needs of the children and families we serve. Specifically, we collaborate with local police departments, child officers, hospitals, schools, clinics, and orphanages to identify the most at-risk children. We also communicate closely with our government on a local and national level to ensure that our solution is complementary to existing programs.

This combination of experience, proximity, endorsement, and expertise make us well-equipped to deliver a successful solution that will help improve the lives of children around the world.

The Solve challenge provides us with a unique opportunity to expand our work and reach more children who are in need of primary healthcare and advocacy. We are seeking financial support to help us overcome the barriers to expanding our services. In addition, we are looking to collaborate with technical talent and mentors to assist us in choosing the most viable approach for data collection and analysis for digital systems. This will help us improve our interventions' effectiveness and achieve the largest possible impact. We are confident that, with the right resources and partners, we can make an even more significant difference in the lives of at-risk children worldwide.

OVI is innovative because it combines treatment, technology, and advocacy to protect vulnerable children. Treatment helps protect children from the dangers of sickness, abandonment, neglect, and unnecessary institutionalization in orphanages.

Our solution has the potential to be catalytic in a few ways. First, it provides a solution to a problem that has long been neglected. There are an estimated 153 million orphaned and vulnerable children worldwide (UNICEF), and very little is being done to help them. OVI not only provides a much-needed solution, but it also does so in a cost-effective way.

Second, OVI has the potential to change the market for orphan care. Traditional orphanages are often overcrowded and lack the necessary resources to care for children properly. OVI's health and family-centered approach demonstrates the success of primary healthcare support as an alternative to traditional orphanages.

Finally, OVI's approach can have broader positive impacts on others in this space. By providing a successful risk detection and prevention model, OVI can help reduce the number of abandoned, orphaned, and at-risk children around the world.

1. Utilize CVI data to advocate for policy changes requiring NHIF (health insurance) coverage for all Kenyan children living in orphanages and community institutions in the next one year.

• To achieve the goal of requiring NHIF coverage for all Kenyan children living in orphanages and community institutions, we will need to work with lobbyists to advocate for the policy change. We can use the data from the CVI report to support our argument that all children should have access to health insurance and the imminent risks that institutionalized orphans face in their current living situations.

2. Utilize CVI data to demonstrate the need for prescriptive coverage of infant formula access for victims of maternal death aged 0-6 months in the next one year. 

• To gain prescriptive coverage of infant formula for victims of maternal death aged 0-6 months, we will need to work with lobbyists and key stakeholders to develop a plan that outlines how this can be implemented. The CVI data can help us identify areas where this intervention is most needed and will be most effective.

3. Reduce the number of newly orphaned, abandoned, and vulnerable children in Kenya by 50% in the next five years. 

• This goal will be achieved through targeted interventions such as family tracing and reunification, provision of essential services, community engagement, and preventative measures offered to families at a primary care level.

4. Increase the average Child Vitality Index scores of children in Kenya by 75% in the next five years.
 

• CVI scores will be increased through investment in health and advocacy programs and improved data collection and analysis to better target interventions.

5. Increase the number of children successfully reintegrated into their local Kenyan communities by 100% in the next five years 

• The number of children successfully reintegrated into their local Kenyan communities will be increased by 100% in the next five years through increased healthcare access, improved advocacy measures through the use of our Child Vitality Index, and efforts for policy change to equip Kenyan communities and organizations to provide support services needed to keep children safe and united with loving relatives.

1. Reduction in child mortality rates on an institutional, regional, and national level. 

2. Reduction in the number of abandoned/orphaned children in Kenya.

3. Improvement in healthcare outcomes and overall vitality scores of at-risk children.

4. Increase in the successful reintegration of institutionalized children into their families in Kenya. 

OVI’s theory of change is that by improving the accessibility of primary care and hospital services for socially and medically vulnerable children and by using critical data to support our advocacy, we will be better able to protect these children from preventable illness, abandonment, neglect, and unnecessary institutionalization in orphanages. 

Inputs: We provide donor-sponsored primary and hospital care, infant protection, remote medical camps. We also use predictive analytics and critical data collection.

Outputs: Improved healthcare access for at-risk children, predictive analytics and critical child vitality data to increase child visibility, accountability of child welfare programs, and to support appeals for policy changes in child health and protection. 

Outcomes: Reducing child mortality, abandonment, neglect, and familial separations caused by a lack of access to healthcare and unnecessary institutionalization in orphanages. Identifying those who were most at risk and providing them with targeted intervention

The core technology systems that power our current healthcare programs and Child Vitality Index are predictive analytics with plans for developments in machine learning. Using historical data to predict future outcomes, we can identify at-risk children and keep them healthy and safe. 

Implementing machine learning will allow our computers to learn from data without being explicitly programmed. This improvement will enable us to understand better the patient data we collect and improve our predictions over time.

The roles that will power our CVI software are data analysts, software engineers, and product managers:

1. Our data analysts will organize data from various sources, such as hospitals, schools, and orphanages.
2. Software engineers will build software to power our CVI innovation. This software will take input from our data analysts and uses it to predict which children are at risk of being sick, abandoned, neglected, or unnecessarily institutionalized in orphanages.
3. Product managers will review outcomes to ensure that our team focuses on the correct problems and that the impacts we make are helpful to the populations we serve.

Our solution's primary health care data is collected by our full-time, paid OVI Medical staff. They utilize our Child Vitality Index to establish baseline data on child health and familial separation patterns to measure the improvement after the implementation of interventions over time. Their incentive is to understand the needs of the children in their community and implement targeted interventions to improve their health.

Our approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion is based on the idea that everyone should have access to opportunity and advancement. OVI provides preferential hiring to widows, adult orphans, and marginalized community members as they are intimately connected to our mission of serving orphaned and vulnerable children. We also use a 100% local staffing approach to empower rural Kenyan medical professionals with access to highly impactful and lucrative careers. This approach allows us to create opportunities for people who are often marginalized and underrepresented in the workforce. It ensures that our team is culturally competent and equipped to serve the unique needs of our populations.

Every year, millions of children under five die from preventable causes like diarrhea, pneumonia, and malaria. And for every child that dies, even more, are permanently separated from their families and institutionalized in orphanages because of their fragile conditions. 

Our mission at OVI is to create a world where no child is abandoned or neglected due to illness or lack of resources for care. From our base, the OVI Children's Hospital in Migori, Kenya, we pioneer a new way of treating and caring for vulnerable children that we plan to introduce across Africa and Asia. The OVI team is 100% locally staffed with fifty Kenyan medical professionals, and a support staff intentionally made up of adult orphans, widows, and marginalized community members who are intimately connected to the mission of our work.

Our unique approach combines essential healthcare and advocacy to keep children from becoming orphans in the first place. We also utilize our innovative Child Vitality Index (CVI) solution, a tool using predictive data and analytics to prevent child mortality, abandonment, and neglect on a primary care level.

To date, we have provided over 100,000 donor-sponsored overnight hospital stays for at-risk children and, when possible, reunited them with their families and enabled them to stay out of orphanages.

Our five largest sustainable funding sources are as follows: 

OVI Collective: We accept one-time and recurring donations from individuals worldwide to fund our charitable work. We have a donation page on our website where people can donate.

OVI Global Pediatric Health Experience: Our local medical team offers a 50-hour Global Pediatric Health certificate experience for up to 12 weeks/600 hours at our OVI Children's Hospital in Migori, Kenya. This program helps to fund our nonprofit by providing international participants with an in-depth look at critical global health concepts, disaster response, and pediatric-specific care. This unique opportunity allows us to train the next generation of international health professionals while also providing life-saving medical care to children in need. The program investment is $995/week, with 100% of proceeds allocated towards the hospital fees and care of vulnerable children. 

OVI Global Child Health Fellowship: This summer, we launched a unique membership package that provides both experienced and aspiring child health professionals access to vital resources, support, and weekly events. 100% of monthly and annual fees are directed towards our charitable endeavors. In addition to the fees, we receive critical funding via our sponsorship packages for universities, hospitals, health companies, and wellness brands who wish to market their products and offerings to our growing community of fellows. 

OVI Community Health Initiative: Our outpatient services and twenty of the sixty beds in our inpatient unit are available to children in the community at the cost of service. This initiative allows us to serve all children without reservation and assists us in covering ongoing hospital expenses and salaries for our medical team. It also allows us to allocate other forms of donations to provide free care to the other forty beds reserved for orphaned and abandoned children and families with no resources for care. 

OVI Children's Books and Merchandise Sales: A creative source of funding that we have found to be successful is our children's book and merchandise sales. By selling impact-focused stories and items with our logo and branding, we are able to raise awareness for our cause while also generating much-needed funds. All of the proceeds from these sales go towards child treatment and helping us reach more families in need. 

To date, we have raised 2 million USD in charitable funding for our endeavors, which has had a tremendous reach. We have been able to maintain all paid staffing in Kenya and, therefore, do not have significant operational expenses in the United States. This allows us to direct more of our resources towards our programs and projects, which are having a profound impact on the lives of children. We are grateful for the support of our donors and are hopeful that we can continue to count on their generosity in the future. 

Additionally, we are excited about the developments of our Global Pediatric Health Experience, Community Health Initiative, and Global Child Health Fellowship, which are helping us create less donor dependency and progress into a more promising realm of sustainability. 

Lastly, we credit our ongoing donations and support to the institutions that have increased our accountability and visibility by publicly recognizing our work. Such recognitions include the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for Global Citizenship, the United Arab Emirates Prodigy Bureau Global Humanitarian Award, and our founder's induction into the University of Kentucky College of Health Services Hall of Fame. OVI has also been featured in international media outlets such as The Star and Standard Media in Kenya, NPR, Kentucky Alumni Magazine, and Yahoo and has had multiple recent mentions in Forbes and Fox News. 

With the continued help of our supporters, we are confident that we will be able to achieve our goals and make a lasting difference in the lives of children worldwide.