Health4Rural
Health4Rural is a healthcare delivery and financing solution that provides primary healthcare to neglected rural and underserved communities in Nigeria through trained youth.
We are solving the problems of systemic healthcare exclusion caused by lack of access to healthcare services and the inability to afford healthcare where sparsely available in rural areas of Nigeria.
In a nation questing for peaceful recuperation from massive socio-economic crisis as Nigeria, the importance of health availability and affordability cannot be overruled nor overemphasized. It was reported by the World Bank in June 2021 that about 90 million (46%) Nigerians live below the poverty line, by implication living on less than N600 ($1.59) daily. This has practically made healthcare services unaffordable and inaccessible for about half of the Nigerian population especially in rural communities. Moreover, these figures are projected to worsen with population increase, thereby further excluding much more Nigerians and transnationally about half of African population from the healthcare system (health exclusion)
Health4Rural is a platform for the delivery and funding of key primary healthcare interventions to rural communities in Nigeria. At Health4Rural we train and deploy youth to provide regular primary health care to rural communities in Nigeria as community health workers. Through three development phases we transition our adopted communities from one without any healthcare services to one with a fully residential primary healthcare. Our services include screening and care for:
- silent noncommunicable diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, and hepatitis
- poverty-linked diseases such as malnutrition and Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs), and
- pandemics/epidermics care such as COVID-19 and Lassa Fever.
We look foward to the launch of fully residential maternal
Patient records are managed in our home-built Electronic Public Health Manager (EPHR). Events of public heallth concerns are also tracked and analysed in the system.
We leverage the high youth population of over 48% in Nigeria and strong partnerships to deliver regular primary healthcare to neglected and underserved low-income communities while driving their overall development
We use healthcare as a tool for allround community development.
Our primary targets are low-income earners in rural and underserved communities in Nigeria who otherwise will not be able to access healthcare. The poverty line at $1.9 leaves most of them unable to afford healthcare and with an average healthcare expenditure of less than $0.5 per citizen these group of people are systemically excluded from the healthcare system. Moreover, low government healthcare expenditure causes lack of facilities and trained professionals in their communities making them at greater risk of losing their lives in life-threatening emergencies.
Marginalisation of rural communities in Nigeria goes beyond healthcare to all aspects of the communities including water and sanitation, education, housing and poor economic return for farming activities. These factors, also referred to as the social determinants of health, consequently worsen health outcomes and create greater demand for healthcare services.
Health4Rural is serving this need through our trained youths who provide healthcare services in a community based medicine approach and our digitally enabled one-stop-shop for health.
We are a rounded team of young leaders with experience cutting across, healthcare, international development, data science and operations/logistics management. We are driven by our own experiences and the challenges of people around us which are closely associated with those of our beneficiaries.
Growing up in a middle-income family in Ondo State, Nigeria, healthcare was a major luxury many people in my community could not afford. I experienced firsthand the sad realities of persons who daily had to choose between health and wealth for the lack of the option to choose both, with several people losing their lives to the bargain, like my brother. I believe that the right to healthcare is just as important as the right to life and is deserving for all irrespective of socioeconomic status and, more so, that a threat to this right is a direct threat to life. This is the foundational belief on which I founded Pioneer Medical Initiative in 2018.
Our youth workforce of over 150 volunteers and staff are all people with their unique and deep connection to the struggles of the Nigerian Healthcare system. Our multidisciplinary strength positions us well to change the narrative and use healthcare as a tool for holistic rural development.
User research has been done extensively on our villagers and other potential users. A pilot deployment is being conducted in Awo-Kajola village in Ondo State Nigeria where we have consistently delivered care to over 200 people for over 15 months. Randomized interviews and surveys are conducted monthly to assess the needs of the community members and inform our solution improvement. Our first e-publication describing the community was released in October 2022 to enlighten the public and other development stakeholders on the needs of the community members.
We work in partnership with social, public and private organizations in delivering various components of care to Awo-Kajola village. Our team lead also has experience working with the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research in solving a similar challenge.
We anticipate the conclusion of the 24 months pilot in September 2023.
- Improving healthcare access and health outcomes; and reducing and ultimately eliminating health disparities (Health)
- Pilot: An organization deploying a tested product, service, or business model in at least one community
Unlike most existing social innovations providing care to rural communities our approach of adopting a village and providing care regularly and establishing resident healthcare services is unique and highlights our commitment to sustainability. This approach ensures that change happens systemically and cuts across behavioral, social and economic aspects of our user’s life and community.
Our Electronic Public Health Manager (EPHR) solution which is used to manage medical records, track public health events in a surveillance system, and conduct regular surveys is a catalytic difference in our solution. This innovative integration of home-built technology helps us to achieve better operations and data management efficiencies than existing local solutions. It also improves the ability of our solution to scale to other African communities with high level of quality assurance.
Our focus on low-income earners and our B2B2C funding strategy is unique as similar solutions currently focus on serving the upper and middle class who can afford home-based care out-of-pocket. The financial efficiency of our model is a significant improvement and unique feature of our solution. By leveraging a system of paid volunteerism, detailed training programs and strong private-social and public-social partnerships/contracts out-of-pocket cost of care is well reduced to suit our target group’s spending power. This innovative and sustainable component of the solution is expected to change the income dichotomy deepening healthcare inequalities in Nigeria.
To establish resident primary healthcare services in 5 villages in South-West Nigeria through the Health4Rural healthcare model
To provide primary healthcare services to 2,000 people in 5 adopted villages in South-West Nigeria over the next 12 months.
To profile and document 10,000 people in rural communities in the Electronic Public Health Record Manager (EPHR) and feed data into the National Healthcare Database.
To lessen the maternal and child mortality burden in rural communities through the introduction of maternal health and child delivery into the Health4Rural PHC scope in a pilot deployment.
To raise $100,000 in seed funding to develop our EPHR technology, build our low-tech one-stop-shop for health in rural communities, increase our human resource by 150% and care for our villages
Our solution is powered by the integration of advanced and low-tech technologies in our Electronic Public Health Medical Record Manager (EPHR)
The EPHR is a digital tool for the aggregation, storage, analysis, and management of medical information of undocumented persons living in rural and low-resource communities in Nigeria. The solution seeks to back up healthcare advocacy, activism and planning with data-based evidence toward the inclusion and equitable representation of underserved populations in the country. It contains two components:
The Electronic Patient Record (EPR). The EPR is popularly called Electronic Medical Record (EMR) in similar products and is used to document patient medical records and create insights on patients’ health progression.
The Public Health Manager used to perform community health operations such as Community Health Assessments CHA), report and track local events of public health interest, create and conduct customized research and studies among other features.
The EPHR is available in a web version and mobile version. The web version is optimized for managing organization process, data analytics and insight generation and high level of data integrity. The mobile version is optimized for offline data collection in rural/remote communities. Data is organized and stored in encrypted forms to protect the identity of the users.
All data are collected and imputed by Health4Rural’s trained personnel.
The EPHR is able to serve multiple organizations and projects and we will be onboarding our first third-party organizations in the Q3 of 2023. In the future, we look forward to introducing a telemedicine feature that allows our villagers to connect to doctors in neighboring communities leveraging low-tech solutions such as USSD and mobile calls.
- Software and Mobile Applications
- Nigeria
Our solution currently serves an average of 200 people monthly in one village, Awo-Kajola- Idanre community in Ondo State, Nigeria.
We have screened over 5,000 people for focus health conditions in one-time encounters through similar projects and user research.
We have also trained 173 paid youth volunteers on basic medical procedures, Emergency Medical Response and healthcare servicing in rural communities in Nigeria.
In the next 12 months, we project serving 1,000 low-income earners in 5 rural communities monthly. We project screening and documenting 10,000 rural dwellers in one-time encounters through our rural healthcare research works.
The most pressing challenge to achieving our goals are primarily funding related. We look forward to raising capital investment of $100,000 to complete the EPHR development, enhance human resource development and lead operations.
With adequate funding and strong technical and startup support from communities such as MIT Solve, we are able to achieve our goals for the next year.
Funding Partners: Fembol Group, Nigeria and VOKI Foundation, Nigeria
Technical Partner: Interstellar Business Solution Limited, Nigeria
Research Partners: Social Innovation in Health Initiative (SIHI), London
Our Business model is B2B2C and B2C.
In our B2B2C model
We consult for and partner with private organizations on Corporate Social Respibility (CSR) and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investing in healthcare. Funds are raised through this partnership to fully sponsor (Full healthcare coverage) or subsidize the care provided to low-income earners in rural communities.
In our B2C model:
Our users are purchase drugs and pharmaceuticals from the one-stop-shop for health following free screening and diagnosis.
We provide the platform for primary healthcare interventions to be delivered to rural communities in Nigeria. This platform human resources, our medical equipment, softwares and the technical know how to access the communities. Our primary consumers are low-income earners in rural and low-resource settings in Nigeria.
Our key resources are our trained volunteers and our partnership contracts.
We are building an indigenous coalition of private funders for healthcare. Through the partnerships, we hope to sustainably lower the cost of healthcare to rural communities thereby achieving Universal Healthcare Coverage in Africa.
We also look forward to a public-Social partnership where dysfunctional government facilities in rural communities will be efficiently managed by Health4Rural and funded by the government.