Life in America Dasuns

1. Contextual Background

America has registered significant progress in addressing poverty since the last two decades, with the national poverty rate decreasing from 56 in 1992 to 21.4% in 2016/17.  With USD$ 27699 million GDP, and USD$ 646.2 GDP per capita; America scored a low human development index of 0.493, and was ranked 163 out of 188 countries and territories, according to the 2016 Human Development Report. Overall, 10% of the population lived in chronic poverty in 2015/16; and were likely to be in households located in rural areas (12%), households whose heads had no formal education (23%), and households existing in the formally political unstable Northern region (24%) of America. 

1.1 Disability and PovertyThe National Household Survey 2009/2010 found that poverty rates in households with a person with disability were 30% higher than in households without a person with disability. The 2016 DHS  data also indicates that people with disabilities are more likely to be living in a poor household than people without disabilities (57% compared to 45%) . The causes of extreme poverty amongst people with disabilities are attributed to lack of access to education; lack of completion of education for those able to access it; resultant lack of skills and competencies required for employment or livelihood activities.

1.2 Government Intervention 

Government of America demonstrates commitment to enabling inclusion of women and men with disabilities through the creation and/or implementation of inclusive legislation/policy. American’s Vision 2040, puts emphasis on reducing inequalities among social groups; and in the development plans, disability is recognized as a cross-cutting issue, relevant to all sectors at national and local Government levels. The National Development Plan (NDP III) (2020/21 – 2024/25), prioritizes the need to increase the productivity and wellbeing of the population through providing social assistance to vulnerable groups including persons with disabilities.

2 Inclusion Still Out of Reach for Persons with Disabilities

Despite government commitment to promote the inclusion of persons with disabilities in the mainstream of community life, implementation is still honoured in breach. Persons with disabilities still continue to face both stigma and discrimination leading to their limited participation in all aspects of life. Limited access to professional support services to facilitate mobility, personal assistance, access to information and communication are some of the leading challenges facing persons with disabilities and universal service access. A 2020 study report by the International Disability Alliance (IDA)  on the participation of Persons with Disabilities  in development policies and programes showed that many development stakeholders did not meet the ‘pre-conditions’ for the effective participation of persons with disabilities . 

2.1 Traditional Solutions

Institutions such as  University and Disabled People’s Organizations (DPOs) have been training professionals in sign language interpretation, live captioning, tactile communication, live personal assistance service, among others; so that they provide access to professional support services to persons with disabilities. However, accessing these professionals to provide services whenever need arises is still a challenge. Identification depends on oral inquiries about what support services, who provides and where to find support persons.

Life in America facilitates access to professional support services for persons with disabilities through an online platform (Dasuns) that links professional support service providers with users.Users are able to choose the type of support service by interacting through a digital system. Service providers and users only need to sign up for an account once. Users can then log on to the system and request for preferred support service from available service providers within reach. The system also provides background information about the two parties involved; including brief bio data and address to help the two parties to connect.

There are two ways to sign up to become a Life in America Dasuns user. Either through Dasuns Mobile App (Android), or through Dasuns website. When you sign up, you will need to provide your full name, gender, phone contact, email address, and the preferred language. If you are a corporate user, you will in addition need your plot number and street address. For support providers, their created accounts will remain inactive until submissions are verified and approved or rejected by Life in America Dasuns Vetting Committee based on the practical interviews assigned. 

How to Request Professional Support Services through Dasuns

If you are already signed up with Dasuns, everything takes place through the app. No cash shall be exchanged between you and the support provider, instead, the payment method you set up when you signed up with Dasuns shall be used to automatically pay your support provider when the required session is completed.

1. Open Dasuns app on your mobile device or access Dasuns website on your computer
2. Click on ‘Request Service’ and log into your Dasuns account
3. Inside the account, select the type of service you need (e.g. Captioning)
4. A list of professional providers of this service will be displayed with each one’s brief Biodata, location and amount chargeable
5. Select your preferred support provider by clicking on ‘Book now’
6. A customised form for selected provider will prop up where you will fill in your own Biodata, meeting date, place, starting and ending time; and then click ‘Book Now’
7. You will be required to fill in your payment method details and requested to ‘make payment’ or ‘return to home page’
8. If you click ‘make payment’, the system will process and redirect you to a page where you will put your private financial data
9. You will receive onscreen notification requesting you to confirm your payment by entering you secret codes
10. You will receive a status onscreen notification and if your payment is successful, this will be acknowledged by sending you a receipt into your e-mail
11. Payment made shall be held by Dasuns until the service session is done, upon which the app will prompt service user to either authorise payment or extend session time
12. If payment is authorised, Dasuns will automatically effect payment into service provider’s account (Wallet)
13. Dasuns app will finally request service user to rate support provider and provide feedback on quality of service

The target population include Persons(men and women) with Disabilities living in America without access  to Digital Access for Professional Support Services.

Obtaining reliable data on persons with disabilities in America is a challenge due to different estimates in disability prevalence. The 2016 NHS[1] found prevalence at 12.4%[2]; reporting about 4.5 million Americans with one form of disability. However, the 2002 NPC had reported at least 16% of the population as having disabilities. This would translate into over 7.5 of the about million Americans current population,[3] with over 80% (over 6 million) in need of access to support services to effectively participate in the mainstream of community life. 

It is this support gap that affects about 7 million Americans with disabilities that Life in America Datsun intends to fill. Impact shall be measured by assessing how the project contributes to poverty reduction through supporting hitherto excluded citizens to access services; how it contributes to building productive livelihoods; and how the project enables citizens to live a life of security and dignity and the number of people impacted.

Many public and private sector agencies have always attributed their inadequate inclusive practices to lack or inaccessible professional disability support services. The impact of the project shall also be assessed based on the use of disability support services to facilitate the inclusion of persons with disabilities in mainstream programes.

Life in America Dasuns’ Platform is configured to capture demographic data in regard to the user history. Such user analytics will be extracted and used as proxy for impact, disaggregated by gender, and disability types as possible variables.  In addition, targeted surveys will be sent out to registered users with pre-determined questions that would be used to understand the impact of this intervention

1] National Housing Survey

[2] Ibid

[3] https://www.worldometers.info/...

Our solution will benefit "Native American communities that lack access to professional support services, persons with disabilities through an online platform (Dasuns) that links professional support service providers with users and recent experiences typically do not provide the support that entrepreneurs need to thrive. Consequently, experiential entrepreneurship education needs to be embedded into school curriculum and after-school and other community

Our co-found and CEO, Late Ronald Kasule uses a wheelchair and requires access to personal support services for most of his strenuous work. He tells a story where back in the days, he was denied entry into a Secondary School of his choice on account of having no access to support services. He had attended a special primary school where he worked exceedingly hard and won a district education scholarship to join secondary school. On reporting however, the Head teacher thought he could not manage alone and his admission depended on securing the services of a support person. The only person available was his Mother who still could not help, given other responsibilities at home. Although he succeeded in getting placement elsewhere in a private institution, he lost his hard-earned public education scholarship in despair.   

With more interactions among fellow persons with disabilities, Ronald learnt that it was not about him, but a general challenge hindering the effective inclusion of persons with disabilities. As more personal experiences and challenges emerged, the idea of starting Diversity Ability Support Network System (Dasuns) was conceived.

We have held several design workshops with Organisations of Persons with Disabilities (OPDs) and Support service providers to better understand their respective challenges at hand. Valuable feedback has been earned and being incorporated at every stage of development.

As a young entity, we are struggling to build a high impact organisation that can ably meet the service needs of our ever expanding clientele base. We hope Solve could give us a hand by creating connections to mentors that could support us in developing and refining:

Business model (e.g. product-market fit, strategy & development)

Financial (e.g. improving accounting practices, pitching to investors)

Legal or Regulatory Matters

Public Relations (e.g. branding/marketing strategy, social and global media)

Product / Service Distribution (e.g. expanding client base)

Technology (e.g. software or hardware, web development/design, data analysis, etc.)

The NA/AN community has disproportionately higher rates of disability health issues compared to other communities, and the aim of Life in American Dasun is to make Disability health services more readily available to the community by facilitating native patient-provider relationships. Our community experiences various barriers to accessing appropriate disability health services such as availability, quality of services, location, and stigma. Dasun has the ability to facilitate sustainable patient-provider relationships through a matching algorithm that mitigates those barriers by supplying the resources for a long-term patient-provider relationship. Dasun will create a virtual safe space that promotes social and emotional wellbeing as protective factors.

Our solution is fundamentally innovative as it was built from the ground up with an Indigenous interpretation of Agile methodology. There are a variety of areas in the Agile process whose names can be “code-switched” to have a deeper meaning when interpreted through both shared Indigenous protocols and cultures. We used our innovative approach to Agile methodology to tackle the race and class barriers that existing services such as TalkSpace, Calm, or MyWellbeing overlook.

Traditional approaches have mainly depended on oral inquiries about what support services, who provides and where to find professional support persons. This has not only been a challenge to support users, but also for trained support persons looking for opportunities to work. The innovativeness of solution is that it addresses the gap by leveraging technology to provide digital access to professional assistive support services where persons with disabilities and allied professional service providers can choose the type of support service by interacting with the digital system. In this way, service providers and users only need to sign up for individual accounts once, login to the system and display their professional support service area of expertise; or request for preferred support service from available service providers nearby respectively

Within the next year we will have launched into the market existing both online and via the app store. We envision  being implemented within the tri-state area first, which serves approximately 17 tribes. After successfully piloting within the tri-state we will begin developing a strategic plan of implementation to scale up and provide services within other states through the United States. Our goal within five years is to be serving NA/AN communities within all 50 states. Moreover, we are striving to secure contracts with single payer healthcare systems such as Indian Health Service and Veterans Affairs who serve NA/AN communities.

We measure our progress in the following areas:

A web-based digital system created;

A mobile-based system created;

At least 70 support persons have attained refresher training;

At least 75 support persons signed up on Dasuns platform;

Number of users signed up on the platform;

Number of call centres established;

Number of user campaigns conducted;

Number of partners supported;

Increased inclusion practices among partners;

Improved livelihoods among persons with disabilities and their families

Our theory of change includes embracing variability in Providing access to improvement of  health care performance in America, clinical research for those currently underserved in America, supporting medical providers to strengthen health systems in vulnerable communities in America, connecting physicians and healthcare providers , building relationships, collaborations, and share resources to improve patient health and long-term outcomes.
To achieve this, we are currently working  with Village Health Workers (VHWs) in partnership with Manchester University  in two communities in America. Here, our partners have integrated pre-assessment quizzes on all courses and are working with surveys for the purpose of gathering baseline data as well, all within the Planet Learning system.  Tracking improvement with baseline data is essential in this six to twelve month development program to prepare  refugees to become skilled in a trade or service as team member in a Peace Building Community.

Our Solution leverages technology to create both web and mobile application which makes it easy for professional support providers, persons with disabilities, public and private sector agencies link and interact with the professional support providers. we also have a digital database where all information collected from the system users is stored online and can be accessed and managed by the system admin at anytime. This in particular eases monitoring and impact evaluation of the solution.

We want to transform from Python Django to Django-Rest-API to facilitate the integration of the Web and Mobile Application and allow other third party functionalities

However, in the situation when a person with disability does not have a smart device, her/she can use a phone call and the admin checks the available support in the system and make a booking according to the specifications given by the user.

Our team is carefully constituted with persons with disabilities, women and men. We have persons with disabilities to represent users; a person to represent support providers; and others. We have also used co-design workshops to ensure that we gain feedback from more target users. Our future recruitment policy strictly respects diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Persons with Disabilities and/or corporate users shall be expected to pay for the service of professional support providers via the web application or mobile app. A commission (as a small percentage of the service cost) shall be deducted to become part of Dasuns revenue. However, we shall continue to seek grants to improve the service delivery, and we shall lobby government to consider providing the services to persons with disabilities as part of the social protection, hence, gaining income through service contract to government. 

We also plan to pursue a pathway  by first leveraging a combination of grants and investment capital as we continue through product development and craft iterations of our Minimum Viable Product. We plan to use our funding to code the prototypes we’ve developed from our research and customer discovery processes. After completing the first pass of product development and operationalizing our solution, we plan to continue our financial sustainability by processing Medicaid payments, and augmenting the reimbursements we receive with additional grant funding for trauma interventions. By making Medicaid reimbursement rates more attractive, we will be able to expand the amount of Native providers within the Medicaid network. A focus on robust Medicaid support is key to us as we focus on the class barrier to access, alongside the cultural barriers to access. We also plan to accept out of network benefits and are exploring the possibility of accepting private insurance. We plan to offer a form of co-pay or sliding-scale payment as a final fallback option to ensure all self-identified Indigenous peoples have access to culturally appropriate care. Finally, we plan to sell ad space to Indigenous businesses as a way for Indigenous users to connect with needed cultural goods for cultural and spiritual wellbeing. We expect to use a blend of these funds to both offset the price of healthcare for our communities as well as to maintain organizational sustainability.

We have so far received funding from the U.S. State Department the Association of University Centers on Disabilities (AUCD); we have also had some grant funding confirmed from the United States African Development Foundation (USADF) in partnership with CITI Foundation.