Tambua

Tambua is a camera mobile app that enables patients to scan and verify authenticity of medicinal drugs before purchase. The app uses barcode, QR code and location tracking technology to help trace drugs throughout the supply chain, thereby helping in tracking and identification of fake or substandard medicines.

Levit Nudi

Approximately 10% of prescription drugs in Africa are either fake or substandard. As a result of this influx, people risk serious complications or even death from tropical diseases such as malaria, pneumonia and other afflictions that could be easily prevented and or treated via genuine medications. Counterfeit medicines deny patients, especially the vulnerable, access to quality health care services. It also provides loopholes in the economy for tax evaders and other major crimes such as money laundering. More than 100,000 people die in Africa every year from counterfeit Malaria drugs alone. This is equivalent to 5 jumbo jets crushing every single day. Most counterfeiters target the poor and vulnerable communities with their low priced sub-standard drugs which end up hurting them or not giving them the quality treatment they deserve. While dying from a disease may be inevitable, dying from medicine never should be.

Tambua targets the middle class and lower class people across Africa who are susceptible to buying counterfeit drugs. Our ideal target are people who own either smartphones with access to internet or just basic cellphones. We engage our target audience both online and offline to remind them of the importance of verifying authenticity of medicines before purchase. We collect anonymous behavioral traits from our users such as how much they spend, frequency of purchase and their opinion on the effectiveness of their medications. Buyers who think their medications have not been very effective are likely to continue using Tambua mobile app to verify authenticity of drugs on next purchase.

Tambua gives all stakeholders which include Government and law enforcement agencies, citizens and organizations free access to information and data. Citizen access to information through our apps is free of charge. We hope to fully open source our data to help manufacturers and other players in the market to simply plug and play.

We hope to save hundreds of thousands of lives lost every year due to counterfeit medicines. Our product design and development is purely a data driven process. From our experiments and data collection, we noticed that counterfeit drugs are most likely to be sold in middle and low income areas, which include slums and rural areas. These findings led to development of an SMS platform to enable persons without access to internet and smartphones to use our technology.

We hope to open source our technology in the next 8 months to enable contribution and use by scientists and innovators from other countries. By open sourcing, we hope to increase our capacity to keep developing and improving the technology as well as allow for usage beyond Kenya. We also hope to partner with global pharmaceutical giants and leverage on their market presence to scale our solution to different countries.

We are measuring our success based on active usage of our app, user retention and medication effectiveness feedback against our predictions of whether the medicine is genuine or fake. We have more than 2 million verification scans since 2019. Capturing more valuable data, increasing our user base and improving health outcomes is what we consider our success.

Our operations are capital intensive. We currently have a small team and that means a lot of logistical requirements across the country from time to time to collect data. Lack of cooperation from some key pharmaceutical players is also a huge setback as it leads to data gap that could have otherwise made our platform better. By open sourcing our technology, we hope to work with volunteers e.g students and researchers from other regions and countries to contribute to technology development and the database.

1. The Government Of Kenya

2. Kenya National Innovation Agency

3. Royal Academy Of Engineering

4. Chandaria Business Innovation & Incubation Centre

5. Johnsons & Johnsons

6. Justice Hiil Innovation

We are interested in Trinity challenge because it will not only give us an opportunity to scale from funding but also because of its relevance to our core mission. It is also our hope that we will gain more visibility through this challenge various media channels.

We hope to gain audience and further support in terms of mentorship and possible partnerships with pharmaceutical giants like GSK. We hope to
leverage on their experience in the pharmaceutical space to design a
sustainable business model and value proposition for other key players
in the industry