Papers & Publications

Gearing Up for Sierra Leone

Sage Herrick

The Ukweli team is starting our international journey today! Naakesh, Zach, and Rohan are flying into Brussels a couple of days early to see the sights and enjoy Europe. Cassidy also left for Paris today to see France. Sage and Jordan are staying on the east coast until Saturday to prepare everything for our trip. We all will reunite in the Brussels airport this Sunday and head down to Freetown, Sierra Leone. It’s unclear what Khanjan is up to but we are sure he has it covered.

We have one main priority in Sierra Leone this year: launch. Ukweli plans to secure our marketing license, onboard two employees, launch a radio and sensitization program, train CHWs to screen pregnant women, and build relationships with clinics in other districts. Ukweli currently has a strong foothold in the Bombali district but we want to expand to other districts in the north like Tonkolili.

We will face challenges in achieving these goals so we’ve prepared hard this summer. Zach has completed our training modules, certification process, ID cards, sensitization posters, messaging strategies, and everything is ready to print and take to Sierra Leone. We will be bringing two detailed binders detailing our concept of operations for both of our employees. Mr. Bangura will be serving as our quality control manager and we have yet to determine the distribution manager. Naakesh has been checking all these documents for accuracy and clarity and Jordan has been leading the radio programs. Cassidy has been spearheading the marketing license and been instrumental in getting the correct approvals.

We’ve also engaged in other clinical research this summer. Sage and Gabi have been writing up a journal article about distribution strategies for Ukweli. We have 14 locations with 6 months of clinical data and need to find patterns, such as distance vs. willingness to pay or free vs. charged scenarios. This research has involved setting up a MySQL database and completing the multivariate regressions in R Studio. Sage is also working on finishing an older journal article about technological innovations in maternal health and the paths they take to scale.

On a domestic level, our team submitted two final manuscripts to the Global Humanitarian and Technology Conference (GHTC) yesterday. We are excited to attend this IEEE conference in October of 2019. Jordan is the first author on “A case study on implementing a technological medical device into the health care system of Sierra Leone“, which deals with Ukweli’s concept of operations and how they were developed. Rohan is the first author on “Analysis of Failure Modes: a case study of ruggedizing a low-cost screening technology in sub-Saharan Africa” which focuses in on the quality control aspect of our three-parameter test strip. It is exciting to see two new team members spearhead their first papers. Being the first author isn’t easy, and we are all proud of Rohan and Jordan for completing final manuscripts!

We are excited to travel with all 6 team members this year! Sierra Leone will be interesting this year because a huge group is traveling, so we will definitely never be bored. Let’s secure this bag and get Ukweli off the ground.

Wrapping up Mountaintop Initiative

ztd221

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.