Amref Health Africa
With headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya, Amref Health Africa is the largest Africa-based healthcare nonprofit, serving an average of nine million people per year across 35 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. We strengthen health systems and train African health workers to respond to the continent’s most critical health challenges: maternal and child health, noncommunicable and infectious disease (Cancer, Diabetes, HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria, etc), access to clean water and sanitation, and surgical and clinical outreach. Our approach is community-based and makes the people we reach partners, rather than just beneficiaries. Over 97% of our global staff are Africans, so that we are always tackling African challenges with African expertise. The Amref Health Africa in the USA office raises awareness and critically needed funds for our work in Africa.
Through the Stand Up for African Mothers campaign, we are working to train 15,000 midwives to reduce the high rate of maternal mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. Amref Health Africa uses diverse methods to train midwives including traditional classroom-based teaching, and innovative methods such as distance learning and mLearning, which allows midwives to study using basic mobile phone technology. A skilled midwife can provide care and health education to 500 mothers annually.
In 2012, Amref Health Africa won the international Saving Lives at Birth competition for installing user-friendly, solar-powered devices, the We Care Solar Suitcases®, in 100 health facilities in Southwest Uganda. Before installation of the We Care Solar Suitcases®, the health facilities often suffered from power outages, meaning many women were forced to deliver their baby in the dark, increasing her and her infant’s risk to infection and complications. The We Care Solar Suitcases® now provide a reliable source to power lights, charge computers, fetal heart monitors and other medical devices, as well as mobile phones for health workers to use for patient referrals. We worked in partnership with We Care Solar®, the White Ribbon Alliance, and the Ugandan government to roll out the project. Funding was provided by the collaborating organizations of the Saving Lives at Birth competition: the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, the Government of Norway, and the Department for International Development (DFID) in the United Kingdom.
Leap is Amref Health Africa’s mobile platform created to train community health workers (CHWs) faster and more efficiently, whether they live in a poor urban neighborhood, or in a distant rural community. Leap runs on basic mobile phone technology, so health workers can learn at their own pace, wherever they are, using their own mobile phones. Leap began in 2013 as HELP, or the Health Enablement and Learning Platform, which successfully trained over 3,000 CHWs in Kenya. Leap is a partnership between Amref Health Africa and Accenture, Safaricom, Mezzanine, the m-Pesa Foundation and the Government of Kenya. Leap delivers training through a combination of audio text messages and is built around an approved curriculum. Leap also serves CHWs as a collaboration tool, allowing CHWs within the same region to chat and message one another while assessing patients or studying. CHWs can also use Leap as a monitoring tool where they can store their patients’ health information. To date, rural communities where CHWs use Leap have reported dramatic improvements in the health of the community: 100% of women deliver with a trained health worker, a 20% increase in people using immunization services, and an increase of 17% of children benefiting from having their growth and other health stats carefully measured using Leap.
Learn more about amrefusa.org | Learn more about LEAP | Donate to amrefusa.org
