Wet Technik is a student startup founded at Makerere University looking at reducing the costs of water usage and environmental pollution by hazardous wastewater through the use of constructed wetlands. The team is comprised of three students from a multi-disciplinary background with a shared passion for solving the ever-present problem around wastewater handling and to bring to light the potential of its recycling. Through using a mixture of waste bottle caps and pumice in the constructed wetland, Wet Technik has proven that it will reduce the area requirements, making this system even more accessible to factories, schools and eventually households. The constructed wetland is already the cheapest and easiest way to maintain a system to recycle grey water making it very attractive to people in Uganda.
In most LMICs, the average woman attends one prenatal care visit when she first realizes she is pregnant and does not return to the health care facility until it is time for her to give birth or after she experiences severe health outcomes. Preeclampsia is the second leading cause of maternal mortality; accounting for the deaths of thousands of women and babies annually. Preeclampsia is difficult to diagnose because most symptoms mimic many physiologic changes observed in pregnancy, and other complications in pregnancy, hence women are only aware of this condition if they receive routine prenatal care or upon progression of the undiagnosed preeclampsia into a more severe complication; eclampsia. The Early Preeclampsia Detection (EPED) Strip is a low-cost, diagnostic test for preeclampsia that provides a home-based method for women to self-screen for the development of preeclampsia alongside empowering and educating them to seek medical care.
Uganda does not have a dedicated emergency response number (i.e. 911 in the US) and the government has time and again failed to set up an adequate and reliable public ambulance service resulting in slow emergency response times, additional injury to casualties and an altogether diminished chance of survival in critical cases. The Coordinated Emergency Response System (CERS) uses USSD short codes to allow casualties/witnesses in emergency situations to access help using any type of phone. Punching the short code into a phone and following a few prompts allows the user to access a trained ride-sharing taxi operator who quickly transports them to the closest health facility. CERS’ system has the potential to impact at least 40,000 Ugandans who do not make it to the hospital within the “golden hour” by providing a fast, safe and appropriate means of transport.
Many girls in rural Uganda are frustrated with using cloth and banana fibers to manage their menstrual periods, and the standard pads on the market are too expensive for them to afford. In addition to being uncomfortable, the cloth or banana fiber pads can cause infection. Ecosmart is addressing this problem by developing a sanitary pad made from sugarcane residue that is affordable, high quality, and made locally. By leveraging locally available materials to minimize costs in production, Ecosmart will make low cost pads that will improve menstrual hygiene for girls and women in rural Uganda.
Proper disease diagnosis for livestock is essential in determining the suitable treatment, but diagnosis is a challenge for farmers who have limited access to veterinary laboratories and services. To solve this challenge, the Livestock Disease Diagnosis (LIDDIA) team has developed a point-of-care (POC) diagnostic kit to help farmers conduct routine checkups for early and timely treatment. The LIDDIA Kit is based on microscopic principles for hardware and mHealth technology to support the software running the device. The microscopy hardware operates on a smartphone through the LIDDIA app that is made up of a database containing standard images for pre-determined samples that are used as reference images to perform an image match.
Smallholder farmers in low resource settings are forced to sell their crops at low prices shortly after harvest to avoid post-harvest losses, which results in low agricultural financial gains and lack of food security among farming households. A proven solution is the use of metallic silos for long-term storage of crops with less than 1% loss from pests or any other form of degradation. The TRAM project proposes to increase the distribution of metal silos among Ugandan smallholder farmers through an innovative business model that allows the farmer to get the silo at a low initial cost and complete payments through monthly installments. This project has the potential to provide safe food storage systems to 6 million households in Uganda alone and spread to the East African community and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
In developing countries, the cost to diagnose meningitis remains high and therefore many neonates are denied quality healthcare. Approximately 126,000 cases of neonatal bacterial meningitis occur every year in low income countries of which 25–50% develop brain damage and about 40-58% of patients die. The gold standard for diagnosing neonatal bacterial meningitis is a cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) culture. Lumenda provides an accurate and rapid method of diagnosing bacterial meningitis in neonates in low-resource settings. It facilitates rapid intervention and avoids wasteful prophylactic administration of antibiotics by analyzing the optical properties of the CSF to rapidly detect bacterial meningitis at each point along this pathophysiology. The rationale behind the device stems from the clinical observation that CSF turns from clear to opaque when infected with bacterial meningitis.
In Uganda, the most common type of water tap is manual, requiring a user to open and close it with their hand. If the tap is at a public water point, there is 60% chance that the person will walk away with an infection, since adherence to recommended practices, such as rinsing the tap after use is low. Other solutions like sensors are either too costly or not readily available thus preventing their wide scale adoption. PedalTap technology is modifying the existing water tap system to create a no touch cost effective solution for developing countries. We are using metal scrap which is readily available at low cost on the market. With PedalTap, reduced potent and infectious diseases spread, reduced nosocomial infections, better hand washing behaviour and reduced water wastage at water points. There is no hand contact so no risk/ fear of picking infection from the tap at public water point.
Post-partum haemorrhage (PPH) remains the leading cause of maternal death globally despite the significant increase in the number of available interventions. Marked peaks of mortality are recorded more in low resource countries. Team Medzyn’s design solution is a first aid device whose key role is to preserve the mother’s life during referrals or transportation to the health facility. The inflatable first aid haemorrhage belt will be able to stem the bleeding of a haemorrhaging mother. The design is based on the manual external aortic compression technique by a qualified attendant. The belt is to be strapped around the mother as a first aid device to reduce the blood loss and thus increasing the chances of maternal survival. The overall aim is to create an efficient and safe device that is affordable to be adopted in low resource settings as a leading lifesaving first aid.
