Health Supplies and Services

Anne Lee of Brigham and Women's Hospital in the U.S. and Yasir Shafiq of Aga Khan University in Pakistan will develop geospatial models to predict risks of undernutrition among adolescent girls and pregnant and lactating women in settings affected by conflict, climate and COVID-19 to help target interventions. Globally, around 30–40 million pregnant women and 50 million adolescent girls are underweight. Risks of undernutrition have recently been amplified by numerous armed conflicts, climatic shocks such as flooding and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bishesh Khanal of the Nepal Applied Mathematics and Informatics Institute for Research in Nepal will assess LLMs for their ability to provide accurate information on sexual, reproductive, and maternal health (SRMH) topics in Nepali to the general public and female community health volunteers. In Nepal, limited access to SRMH resources due to language barriers and social stigmas has led to increased numbers of unsafe pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. While LLMs could be helpful, they have many limitations, particularly in low-resource, non-Western settings.

Amelia Taylor of Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences in Malawi will employ Large Language Models (LLMs), including ChatGPT and MedPalm, to develop a tool to streamline the collection, analysis, and use of COVID-19 data. Collecting accurate and comprehensive data during a pandemic is critical for response efforts but the process is labor-intensive. During COVID-19 surveillance, there were also limited training materials available to explain specialized concepts for data collection to the multidisciplinary teams.

Chinazo Anebelundu of DSN Ai Innovations Limited in Nigeria will develop a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)-focused multimedia learning platform by leveraging GPT and DeepBrain text-to-video AI tailored to rural students to increase their engagement. Nigeria has an estimated 18.5 million students out of school, a population that can potentially be reached through this more engaging and personalized modality. This platform will integrate local contexts and nuances to enhance student comprehension of STEM subjects.

Alex Riolexus Ario and colleagues at the Uganda National Institute of Public Health will develop a plan that transforms disease surveillance in Uganda by upgrading it to an integrated, real-time, digitized national disease surveillance system that works across the human, animal and environment sectors. Uganda is located in the eco-rich Congo basin and the filovirus and meningitis belts, which increase the risk of infectious disease outbreaks and natural disasters. While electronic tools and reporting are available, they have limited coverage, use, and interoperability across sectors.

Mohamed Alex Vandi and colleagues at the Ministry of Health and Sanitation in Sierra Leone together with Umar N’jai of the University of Sierra Leone will develop a plan to strengthen and integrate the national capacity for disease surveillance in Sierra Leone to better prevent, detect and respond to diseases and public health emergencies. Sierra Leone has a fragile healthcare system, and increasing coordination, human resources, infrastructure and reporting tools would make it less susceptible to epidemic threats.

Sergio Chicumbe and colleagues at the Instituto Nacional de Saúde in Mozambique together with the Ministry of Health and other stakeholders will create a plan for strengthening the national surveillance and response systems established during the COVID-19 pandemic and expanding them to multiple diseases. During the pandemic, they built systems that spanned the public and private sectors to ensure rapid testing and data collection country-wide, as well as data reporting in real-time.

Aamer Ikram and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health in Pakistan will develop a plan for an upgraded and integrated disease surveillance system that detects, reports, investigates and responds to multiple public health threats from communicable diseases like cholera and natural disasters such as floods. The current disease surveillance systems in Pakistan are fragmented and there is no central repository of health information. This hampers data-driven decision-making, which is needed to prevent the spread of disease.

M-mama improves access to emergency transportation to health facilities in rural areas comprising 1) a digital triaging and dispatch platform with a 24/7 toll-free dispatch center; 2) reliable emergency transport leveraging existing government owned ambulance fleets and vetted community drivers; 3) reliable and high-quality care at receiving facilities

North Star Alliance East Africa (“North Star”) is a not-for-profit organization, whose mission is to provide essential health services for marginalized (and often criminalized), at-risk, underserved populations along busy transport corridors in sub-Saharan Africa. The innovation is a sex-worker led Crisis Response Teams (CRTs) to combat sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) against sex workers, whose vulnerability has been magnified by the COVID-19 pandemic.