2024 Progress: Accelerating Towards Impact
Published to the Blog
February 7, 2024
We’re off to a strong start in 2024, strengthening our team, our technology, and our core offering of online courses for health workers in Nigeria.
Growing our team
We’re thrilled to welcome two new team members:
Karl Keefer - Director of Technology: Karl is a full-stack software engineer who, starting as a volunteer, led the development of our new learning platform that is tailored to the needs of the health workers we serve. Karl has over a decade of experience working on entrepreneurial projects in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors and building highly scalable web applications.
Dr. Obinna Ebirim - Partnerships Advisor: Dr. Obinna is a physician and public health expert who will manage key relationships with government and nonprofit partners in Nigeria. He has held leadership roles in many innovative global health programs, including the GiveWell-recommended charity New Incentives.
Releasing our learning platform
In January, we completed and launched version 1.0 of the HealthLearn learning platform. The platform is tailored to our audience’s technology and learning needs, and customized to align with our pedagogy. Health workers in Nigeria can access our growing course catalog on the platform here, while users outside of Nigeria can try out sample modules from all of our courses. We’re excited to have our product in the hands of users, providing new feedback loops to help us quickly learn, iterate, and improve our intervention.
Launching courses
We have made substantial progress on two courses:
In partnership with Resolve to Save Lives, we launched IDSR Foundations, a course that teaches integrated disease surveillance and response (IDSR) to health workers in Nigeria. In disease outbreaks, a failure to detect and report early cases is one of the biggest bottlenecks to an early response. This course aims to address that gap: teaching health workers how to recognize cases with outbreak potential, properly report them, and quickly take steps to protect themselves and their communities.
We received formal approval from the Department of Family Health of Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (FMoHSW) to offer our Newborn Care Foundations course. FMoHSW leadership found the results of the pilot we completed last year to be compelling. We expect to launch the course by mid-February, making it available for free to any health worker in Nigeria who wishes to take it.
Looking ahead
We will focus most of our effort in 2024 on finding efficient models for scaling up to reach thousands of health workers, and conducting a small-scale evaluation of how our courses influence health workers’ clinical practice.
How you can help
Make a donation. We’re still actively fundraising, with the goal of raising $109,500 to support our activities for the next year. This funding will ensure that we can complete the clinical practice evaluation, putting us in a strong position to apply for “big philanthropy” funding in 2025 and beyond.
Volunteer with us. We're seeking collaborators and advisors who have expertise in growing and scaling up consumer-facing tech products in Africa.
Partner with us. With a rapidly improving product and growing user base, we’re keen to partner with NGOs, donors, and governments to create and offer more courses to health workers in Nigeria.