With a little over a week left before the Ukweli team leaves for Sierra Leone, Mountaintop has entered the final stages of work. Sage and Naakesh have returned to Lehigh from Washington DC and Uganda, respectively, so our team now has four members working at Lehigh.

With a month gone by since the last update, a lot of progress has been made. Our crowdfunding campaign has wrapped up, and we would like to thank the nearly 40 donors who contributed almost $3,ooo to our campaign! We have begun submitting corporate grant applications in addition to our crowdfunding effort, and will hopefully bring in some more capital to help our venture fund operations for Ukweli in Sierra Leone.

With crowdfunding over, more attention will now be put towards concepts of operations and messaging. The team is wrapping up marketing and messaging strategies specific to different stakeholders in Sierra Leone (Community Health Workers, Mother Support Groups, Peripheral Health Units) in order to get the word out to pregnant women about the importance of getting screened. In addition, more work will be done on spreadsheets that will help Ukweli and partners on the ground keep track of inventory, purchases, and other data that would help Ukweli operate at a higher level.

Work has continued to be ongoing in regards to quality control testing of our strips, mainly towards the preeclampsia parameter. Basic light, humidity, and temperature tests have been conducted and finalized, and it is still determined that the preeclampsia assay holds up much better to harsher conditions than the UTI parameters on the strip. With the basic testing done, work has begun on compound exposure tests, which expose the strip to conditions for a shorter period of time over multiple trials. The goal of this testing is to see if multiple, short term exposures impact the quality and readings of the strips in the same way one, long term exposure does.

We are also proud to announce that two different papers by Ukweli have been accepted to the GHTC conference that will be held this fall in Seattle. One of the papers highlights the quality control measures that Ukweli has taken to ensure that our test strip will hold up against the more humid and hot conditions present in Sierra Leone, and also how these measures can be translated to other medical devices. Our other paper highlights the concepts of operations strategies Ukweli institutes in Sierra Leone to ensure the venture runs as smoothly and effectively as possible. Both papers have been accepted with revisions requested, so our team has been busy making edits to make sure the papers are in the best form they can be.