With the aim of decreasing child mortality.
One year UNICEF-project to decrease under five child mortality in developing countries.
Above: Pictures from the field visit to Ibadan, Nigeria to meet and learn from the local decision makers, mothers and healthcare workers.
Context
In terms of overall child development, the years from birth to age five are the most important. In many countries around the world, these years are also the most dangerous. Each year in the developing world, millions of children under five die from preventable causes such as inadequate sanitation, insufficient medical care or a lack of clean water. Healthcare organizations have identified the five main dangers to children in this age range as malaria, diarrheal disease, pneumonia, complications during pregnancy, and complications during birth. Creating a solution for even one of these problems has the potential to slash child mortality rates by a significant margin.
Alongside our partner, the UNICEF Innovation Unit, our team of four engineering students from Stanford University and four multidisciplinary students from Aalto University were determined to fight child mortality. Our team visited Nigeria, a country with child mortality rates among the highest in the world. The team travelled in two parties at different times, but came to one conclusion: the biggest challenge is the large number of mothers who in fact never visit the health centers, thus not having the right knowledge about child health nor access to medical care. This is a result of a lack of access and long distances to the healthcare centers, the lack of trust in the health system and sometimes cultural issues that prevent women from leaving their house.
Process and project goal
The design brief provided to the team was rather broad and encompassed a large and foreign problem space. The key challenge for us entailed exploring this vast and unfamiliar space, narrowing down the scope and identifying potential intervention opportunities before deciding to pursue one (or a few) of them in depth. Given this situation, it was important to allow for a longer and wider than usual exploratory phase and utilize a variety of exploration techniques during the project.
Early on interviews with field experts and desk research provided the team with the basic scaffolding including potential areas of interest and contextually important issues. The team picked some problem/design cases from among these and went deeper into the same - iteratively identifying needs, developing personas, benchmarking existing solutions (where applicable), evaluating assumptions and refining the understanding via exploratory prototypes. The whole process can be mapped out as a set of clear steps, but in reality, it was much more iterative and parallel in nature.
The field trips to Nigeria provided another, greater opportunity for validating our assumptions and corresponding course-correction and ultimately proved to be the turning point in the design process.
Below: Pictures from the development process of the portable healthcare center, CareSquare.
Traveling healthcare center.
To tackle this problem, we developed a solution to bring the healthcare services closer to the mothers. This is achieved by CareSquare, a portable healthcare station that the health worker can carry as a backpack to communities. To achieve the maximum impact, our product focuses on the three biggest problems with child healthcare in Nigeria: low vaccination rates, malaria and diarrhea.
With the CareSquare the healthcare worker is able to give vaccinations, distribute malaria- and diarrhea medication, and share information about taking care of the child with the mothers in their everyday environment. To increase the trust between the community and the healthcare system, our solution also includes a contact person from the community, who informs the community when the healthcare worker is coming and also joins on the actual day to help with the organizing.
The CareSquare is supposed to close the gap between the healthcare system and its users that currently exists. It will help increase the vaccination rate in Nigeria (which is alarmingly low at 63%) and also help fight malaria and diarrhea. In the future the CareSquare can be modified and used to save the lives of children in other contexts in the developing world.
Below: The final product, a portable healthcare center backpack for healthcare workers to reach and promote healthcare system in local communities.
Key takeaways
Most of the project time the Aalto and Stanford teams spent apart and worked together remotely utilizing video calls and sharing materials and results in common platforms. We wanted to ensure constant communication between the teams and our liaison UNICEF Innovation Unit in New York to decrease misunderstandings and keep everybody on the same page. We had a list of tools and programs to ensure seamless communication. Having a shared understanding of the overall communication process is essential. This means that every team member knows what kind of information needs to be shared and what is the right tool to deliver it.
Our greatest technical challenges occurred during the field visits to Nigeria due to lack of internet, but we adapted and solved the communication problem during the trip by sending sporadic emails and having phone call conversations.
On the other hand, the field visits turned out to be the pivoting point of the whole project. We experienced how nothing truly compares to the first hand information from the real environment and stakeholders. Trying to understand the root of the problem we were trying to solve, we performed user interviews, researched the overall community, and what we came up with was one staggering fact — healthcare workers were not visiting communities and worked strictly out of their healthcare centers. Here our focus shifted from the mother to healthcare workers and to enhance their every day work to meet the community. This would not have been possible without the trips to Nigeria.
When presenting our findings, we were forced to not only share our notes but all of our observations from our time in the country. We found that sometimes the most important information came from simple observations that we were able to communicate in our meetings.