Okoa Health

Susan is a single mother of five doing odd jobs for a living. One of the children has been unwell for two days and is on over-the-counter medication bought at the local chemist. 50% of Kenyans pay out of pocket (CarePay 2019), maintaining the vicious cycle of poverty.

Around midday, the child’s condition worsened. She leaves the other children playing outside and spends fifty shillings on a motorcycle to get to the hospital quickly and another fifty for registration on arrival at the facility.  She has no health insurance because she doesn’t have an income guarantee to maintain premiums. 51% of Kenyans live hand to mouth (CBK report, 2019), increasing the risk of falling into abject poverty. According to UNDP, only 7.9% have health insurance access, and are skewed toward the wealthy.

The facility is bustling, so she waits an hour before seeing a doctor because there is a staff shortage in public hospitals. By 2019, Kenya still had a significant health human resources gap (Masibo R, Kiarie H. and Bartilol P. 2019). The doctor finally attends to the child. He has no record of the child’s previous treatment at the local chemist. However, the vaccination notes on the ANC booklet indicate that the child did not receive all childhood vaccines. Childhood vaccination coverage has stagnated over the past decade (Mary Agócs et al. 2021). He sends the mother and child for new laboratory investigations. At the laboratory, she is told that the tests cost five hundred and fifty. She only has one hundred shillings left. She informs her husband, who instructs her to do the tests she can afford, so only a malaria test is done.

She waits for two hours before the results are out. The test is negative. She returns the results to the doctor and waits another hour before she is attended to because the queue is very long. It’s almost six o’clock when she finally enters the doctor’s office. She is given a prescription for a painkiller and antibiotic and is released to go home. Late in the night, the child gets worse, has difficulty breathing, and is in desperate need of oxygen. Stories from communities affirm the need for change in public healthcare promotion. However, in Africa, primary healthcare is expensive, access to primary healthcare is a hustle, and there isn’t emergency funding in healthcare to avert poverty. 

Digital health platform providing access to primary healthcare, health credit, and digital health insurance. The solution creates a free platform where demand and supply of healthcare is maintained by human centered designs. The user downloads the app to create a customer account or vendor account. The technology employs biometric security and double 2 phase authentication system to secure the user. The customer account is the household in need of health and credit services and the vendor account is the shopkeeper as the community health insurance agent earning commissions. 

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The target population is men and women of all age groups with or without underlying illness, children, and LGBTQ. Women bear the social burden of healthcare, men bear the economic burden of healthcare; children bear the greatest effect of disease, while the LGBTQ face discrimination when accessing healthcare.

Okoa Health provides access to quality, affordable, and convenient digital healthcare at the doorstep with guaranteed patient privacy. The health credit services guarantees access to healthcare even when premiums are in arrears. 

The team has a strong background of human centered design. This design process works with the community in developing the product. We collect user feedback from the app to continuously improve our product.

500 users currently using ShopOkoa

The team is hoping to overcome financial barriers to develop and operate Okoa Health. The technical capacity to develop Okoa Health requires partnerships with leading technical party like Democrance to operationalize. Call for Change Africa also hopes to overcome legal barriers and become a legally registered entity. Okoa Health will also overcome cultural barriers from hospital based visits to virtual visits.