e-LAFIA

Today, there are 6.3 million people living in rural communities in Benin (World Bank) who are most afflicted by high mortality rates due to non-communicable diseases, such as malnutrition, high blood pressure or respiratory diseases. According to WHO, premature mortality linked to these diseases in Benin was 49.4% for men and 36.4% for women in 2020, due to the poor availability of data, and the insufficiency, or even nonexistence, of information at the level of the population and health service providers on the methods of prevention and management of these diseases.

Furthermore, an estimated 3.4 billion people live in the rural areas of developing countries (IFAD) who aremore vulnerable to climate change because of their high dependence on natural resources, and their limited capacity to cope with climate change (OECD). According to one Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, most observed adaptation efforts to climate change have been too fragmented and small-scale to efficiently tackle global warming. IPCC warns that, unless CO2 emissions are significantly reduced by 2030 to help limit global warming below 1.5°C, we will not be able to prevent the irreversible loss of the most fragile ecosystems as well as repeated crises within the most vulnerable populations and communities.

Finding a way to easily collect primary health care data and to disseminate methods of management or prevention of diseases to populations and front-line health workers, as well as finding a way to track and reduce CO2 emissions in rural areas, will help improve the health of millions of people.

e-LAFIA is a low-cost versatile mobile GPS application on smartphones and tablets that enables the collection and dissemination of location-based data related to primary health care and CO2 emission reductions in the rural communities of Benin. This solution has been developed in Benin by a local developer using HTML open coding so it can be improved and further customized easily and inexpensively. It has been designed for use by local populations and is therefore well adapted to the terrain in Africa and well-suited for scale in developing countries. It relies on the use of tablets and smartphones but does not require connectivity to a mobile or wi-fi network (mobile phone penetration as a percentage of population reached 91.9% in 2020 in Benin, according to World Bank). GPS positioning only requires a line of site with satellites, which is always available. 

Data is acquired on site in remote rural area and entered into the devices. It is then transferred and aggregated into a server, or shared across information systems, once devices are back within the coverage of a mobile or wi-fi network. Tablets and smartphones will be used to display video tutorial and other actionable information to populations and front-line health workers in remote rural areas. Network connectivity for this task is not required either but power-banks may be needed to ensure the continuous operability of the devices in rural areas with no power.

e-LAFIA will be used primarily by our team to collect the GPS coordinates of 10,000 Improved Cooking Stoves (ICS), which will be deployed by Wakapou in the households of its union of cooperatives as part of a certified carbon offset project. During the process of deploying the ICS, our team will assist front-line health workers to use our e-LAFIA application to streamline the collection of primary health data related to non-communicable diseases among the same households. This data will be location-based and later aggregated to allow a more accurate and comprehensive data interpretation by health officials and front-line workers. E-LAFIA will also provide easily accessible and actionable information to front line health workers and populations in the form of guidelines and good practices video tutorials on the methods of prevention and management of these diseases. 

Today, according to local health officials and to WHO, there are no data collection at the level of the population and health service providers on the methods of prevention and management of most diseases. e-LAFiA has the potential to fill that gap rapidly and cost-effectively. 

We have identified four target groups:

Front-line health workers and health officials. They monitor and deliver primary health care to rural populations and, according to interviews, they urgently need data and tools to improve their service delivery.

Middle-aged women in rural areas. They are traditionally in charge of cooking for their family and are the primary users of Improved Cooking Stoves (ICS). They need a reliable stove that reduces wood consumption and cooking time to reduce spending on wood and have more time to for income generating or educational activities. They also need a stove that emits less smoke which is particularly harmful to children.

Large corporations in developed countries. They buy carbon credits issued by projects in developing countries to offset their global carbon footprint. They seek CO2 reduction projects which have the highest social impact. 

Carbon credit certification body. They issue carbon credits for sale based on hard evidence of CO2 reduction. The GPS tracking of ICS locations helps them monitor and audit the number of ICS deployed by Wakapou.

We used observations, interviews, and publications to validate our assumptions about their needs.

Observations: We work closely with farmers in rural areas, and we are aware of their living conditions as well as their health and educational aspirations for their families. We also work with large corporates, which publicly express their need to reduce their carbon footprint as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility policy.

Interviews: We met and exchanged with health officials and front-line health workers in ten different local medical centers, clinics, and dispensaries to find out what were the most prevalent diseases affecting rural populations and which ones they could have the most impact on if they had timely and accurate data about these diseases. All of them (100%) clearly identified getting data on respiratory diseases and malaria as their top priority.

Publications: from the World Bank, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) of the United Nations. 

We intend to send annual surveys to users and beneficiaries of our eLAFIA solutions to deepen our understanding of their needs and to improve the relevance of our solution.

Our team is currently small because our solution is at the Prototype stage. It is comprised of a local software programmer, an agricultural economist and expert in economics of climate change, and a local working group of primary health professionals which helps define questionnaires for data collection. They are all from the communities that we intend to serve. We are supported by The Natural Initiative in France, which offers a network of international experts uniting their forces and competences in order to reach the UN Sustainable Development Goals by developing and operating innovative projects with strong social and environmental impacts.

To make sure that the design of our solution would be meaningful to the communities we serve, we met and exchanged with health officials and front-line health workers in ten different local medical centres, clinics, and dispensaries to find out what were the most prevalent diseases affecting rural populations and which ones they could have the most impact on if they had timely and accurate data about these diseases. 

We initially had the intuition that adding a module for primary health care data collection to our e-LAFIA solution could be impactful and the right thing to do. Then, during our customer discovery process, we realized that primary health data information was insufficient, or even nonexistent, at the level of the population and health service providers, who were asking for support in that domain. We decided then that we should help fill the data gap and support health workers to better prevent and manage the diseases that most affected rural communities.

We are applying to Solve because we would greatly benefit from assistance and funding to turn our prototype solution into a pilot that can effectively scale and deliver the impact we are trying to achieve.

Our solution provides a significantly improved approach because, according to WHO, no one gathers primary health data among rural communities or monitors its evolution over time. It will be a simple but effective way to strengthen healthcare workers’ ability to provide better quality primary healthcare and deliver essential information to populations.

e-LAFIA is building a low-cost versatile mobile GPS application on smartphones and tablets that enables the collection and use of location-based data, starting with tracking the deployment of Improved Cooking Stoves(ICS). ICS address two acute needs: to reduce the environmental, social and economic impacts of open fire cooking; and, to meet the demand for high-quality carbon credits to satisfy regulated or voluntary emissions reduction targets. Our current revenue model is to sell related carbon credits to large corporates at current market prices of $10 to $15 per carbon credit. 

In the next 12 months, we will start deploying 10,000 ICS within the communities that we partner with for the collection of shea kernels. In addition to our core activity of tracking Improved Cooking Stoves, we will scale vertically by adding new services such as the collection of primary health care data and the provision of easily accessible and actionable information to front line health workers to improve the performance of primary health care. These services have a high social positive impact and increase the value of the carbon credits they are associated with. As a result, they will be provided free of charge. The revenue model here is that of a subsidy by the sale of carbon credits. 

In the following years, we plan to scale our project horizontally by expanding the deployment of ICS and primary health care data collection to other rural communities in Benin and then to neighboring West African countries. We are in discussions with large corporates who are buying carbon credits generated by ICS. The demand is strong and expected to grow. According to MSCI Research, the market value of global compliance carbon credits traded in 2021, was approximately EUR 760 billion, up 164% from 2020. 

Our progress will be easily measured by the increase in the number of households with our Improved Cooking Stoves and which have been included our primary health data collection.

e-LAFIA provides easy to use, and actionable information to front-line health care workers. This includes location-based data on non-communicable diseases as well as guidelines and video tutorials on ways to prevent and manage such diseases. Our immediate goal is to provide a tool to front line health workers to help increase the quality and timeliness of collected primary health data and to decrease the high premature mortality rate linked to non-communicable diseases.  

e-LAFIA also includes accurate location-based data on improved cooking stoves to be used by Wakapou to track their deployment, show compliance with CO2 emission reduction objectives as part of a carbon credit certification, and sell carbon credits to large corporates.

These outputs link to our long-term outcomes, which consist of improving the health and economic opportunities of rural populations in Africa while limiting the impact of global warming on the planet.

The technology that we use is well-tested and low-cost to facilitate its adoption and use in rural Africa. To create menus and forms for data collection, our e-LAFIA solution is using free HTML coding, which is one of the easiest front-end programming languages to master. To determine location, our solution is using free GPSpositioning software that connects data terminals to a series of satellites from the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) network. To collect and disseminate information, e-LAFIA uses smartphones and tablets, which are available at affordable prices (new or secondhand markets).

Primary health care data will be collected by front-line public health workers with the help of an electronic tablet or smartphone. They will receive a fee (locally called per diem) to cover travel expenses.

Our corporate policy is to be inclusive and ban all discriminations based on race, religion, gender, political views, handicaps, or sexual preferences. 

Our current revenue model is to sell certified carbon credits generated by Improved Cooking Stoves to large corporates wanting to offset their carbon emissions at current market prices of $10 to $15 per carbon credit. 

Our primary health data collection service will be free of charge, and we do not intend to sell anything to front-line health workers. This is how we intend to provide value to them: getting more without spending more.

According to research, each ICS reduces wood consumption by 60% over traditional stoves and helps reduce CO2 emissions by 3 tons per year, thereby creating a healthier environment inside the household. Each ton of CO2 reduction equates to 1 carbon credit worth $10 to $15 on the market when it relates to ICS. Once the 10,000 stoves have been deployed, this project will produce a total reduction of 30,000 tons of carbon dioxide and a revenue of $300,000 per year. The revenue model here is that of a subsidy of primary health data collection by the sale of carbon credits at higher prices due to high social impact content.

Wakapou received a grant from the King Baudouin Foundation in 2020 to build a shea butter production facility. The project was completed and we started producing and exporting shea butter in 2021, providing direct jobs to 50 people and indirect employment to over 1,000 shea collectors.