Apr
6
Conference Stories: Unite For Sight Global Health & Social Entrepreneurship Idea Incubator Workshop
April 6, 2010 | Leave a Comment
by Lorraine Githiora
On November 5, 2009, Temie Giwa and I attended the Unite For Sight Global Health & Social Entrepreneurship Idea Incubator Workshop in New Haven, Connecticut. We left for Yale excited to discuss our plan for community health workers in Kano, Nigeria with other socially conscious students and professionals.
Our idea was to train young people in Kano, Nigeria to conduct basic health work in their communities. The concept was to train young adults in the region to provide basic nursing services to their community members, providing them with a moped for transportation, and a toolkit with medical supplies. This person would travel to homes within a specified neighborhood and provide services such as basic preventive treatment, and assessment of illnesses. For those illnesses beyond the scope of the health worker’s knowledge, he or she would be charged with reporting such cases to a local health institution.
This way, there would be room for growth in training health workers because they could become more specialized. We saw this as an opportunity to invest in a health intervention that addressed the existing problems (like access to healthcare), rather than the sensational problems that sell newspapers. By integrating community health initiatives with existing or available infrastructure and resources, we expected to foster long term, pro poor partnerships with a lasting impact.
We understood that a project of this scope required focused planning and partnership. That is where the Ideas Incubator came in: we hoped to draw on the collective knowledge of health practitioners and the Unite For Sight team to improve our project, and were definitely happy that that they chose us to attend the Global Health and Social Entrepreneurship Ideas Incubator.
The Incubator really helped us realize that what we are learning in the MPA program at MIIS has more than prepared us to tackle some of the world’s greatest challenges. We received very positive feedback from the other participants about the potential of our project to improve health outcomes in Kano, Nigeria. It was a wonderful opportunity to speak with Jennifer Staple-Clark, founder of Unite For Sight, about starting and scaling up her organization, which works on providing eye care to marginalized communities around the world.
Many of the preferred practices we learned about during the Incubator were similar to the conclusions we reached using MPA tools and frameworks in our project outline and proposal. In addition to the boost of confidence, we welcomed the chance to meet new people working on similar issues in various parts of the world. The Incubator gave us the chance to expand our network and contribute to a growing consciousness about the importance of public/private partnerships in healthcare (and other service) provision worldwide.
We look forward to further improving and implementing our plan to improve the capacity of residents in Kano, Nigeria to provide effective, efficient and affordable health care for its residents.
