By Chuck Slaughter, Founder and CEO

Given the billions of aid dollars spent to improve the health systems of Africa, it may surprise you to learn that the majority of Africans still turn to the private sector for their health care. Not because the private sector provides great service or cheaper prices. But rather, for many, it remains the only option. Public health centers are all too often under-staffed and out-of-stock.

The private sector may be filling the gap, but it is not solving the problem. Private health care providers are plagued by excessive fragmentation and little to no oversight — resulting in high prices and poor quality. The retail price for basic, essential medicines is commonly over 300 percent of the manufacturing cost. Store shelves are stocked with expired and counterfeit drugs. And poorly trained, poorly monitored outlets are the norm. In short, health systems across Africa are still chronically sick.

Sounds pretty grim doesn’t it? It is. But healthcare in Africa is also an enormous opportunity.

Excessive fragmentation, high prices and low quality are the telltale signs of a market ripe for radical disruption. 

Dysfunctional markets provide fertile ground for innovation. The opportunity to reinvent healthcare in Africa is there for the taking. And social entrepreneurs are leading the way.

Powerful, mission-driven models focused on market-based solutions are disrupting broken health systems throughout the developing world. The world’s largest eye care provider, Aravind Eye Care System, built a fully self-funded model for eye care by adapting the corporate management practices of McDonald’s and an innovative cross-subsidy model of tiered pricing. Aravind has treated more than 32 million patients — 60 percent of which pay very little or nothing at all.

LifeSpring Hospitals uses a similar approach to achieve sustainability and scale for its chain of high quality maternal hospitals. World Health Partners creates market efficiencies by organizing local resources and leveraging telemedicine to connect rural patients and care providers to skilled care professionals.

At Living Goods, the social enterprise I founded, we harness the buying power of large networks of franchised agents to deliver lower prices on high quality health products and services to the half million poor customers we serve in Uganda. And we use mobile technology to track impacts and drive demand for health products and services all the while reducing the costs to market and monitor. At scale, these models will improve the quality of life for millions of health care consumers while also reducing the resource burden on public health systems.

As African economies continue to improve, the demand for health care across all sectors is sure to grow.

The IFC estimates that the market for healthcare will increase to $35 billion by 2016. Those who create, support and invest in powerful new models stand to benefit — as do the millions of health care consumers all across the continent.

This post originally appeared on the World Economic Forum’s website.

We’re pretty impressed with Nanyanzi Harriet. 

“I’ve always wanted to be a doctor; for as long as I can remember” she told us last week. “Just like my father. He was a doctor at Mulago Hospital.” But her father passed away when she was young, she said, and there was never enough money in the family to send her to school.

Much later in life, she joined Living Goods as a Community Health Promoter, and her dream has come true in a roundabout way because of it. We see the proof – everyone she comes across addresses her respectfully with the Luganda word for health worker, Musawo. As she gracefully escorts us around her quiet community in the sub-county of Nsangi, outside of Kampala, her customers come out of the woodwork. 

One woman buys syrup for her cough, another recently bought treatment for her child’s diarrhea, and multiple women proudly walk over to present their newborn babies to their Musawo. 

They thank Harriet for the services she provided during their pregnancies.  “She took care of everything,” says Nahura Sharon, who delivered a healthy baby girl just one month ago. “It was like having a hospital at home.” Sharon also received Living Goods SMS messages advising her on products and services to support her during pregnancy and prepare her for delivery, followed up by post-natal guidance on breastfeeding, nutrition and hygiene. Harriet visited her regularly, keeping a close eye on Sharon’s progress. “In my first pregnancy, this kind of access to a doctor was impossible,” Sharon explains. “You would have to travel far, and the assistance you get at the hospital is not personal. It was very different this time. Musawo is always available.” 

Another neighbor, Namulindwa Sarah, has to travel 7 miles to her nearest government hospital for medicine. “The transport is too expensive!” she says. “I have to pay 3,000UGX (1.15 USD) each way, and the hospital is always busy; sometimes you even go and leave without being seen because there are too many people waiting. But Musawo, she is right here. When my son has diarrhea, she comes to my home, and the treatment of ORS and Zinc only costs me 1,400UGX (.55 US cents).”

“This is what I have always wanted,” Harriet says. “To work in my community and help them with their health. I thank God that what I always wanted is now here.” 

What better quote could we leave you with? 

Chris Murphy, Director of Marketing & Development and Molly Christiansen, Director of Research & Partner Development joined Danone at their Paris offices last week to talk about our work at Living Goods and what we’ve learned so far about addressing health and nutrition in developing countries. We were honored to be given the opportunity. Here’s their take on the afternoon:

Paris, 8^th March. In typical (i.e. gloomy) Parisian weather, a group of people gathered at Danone’s headquarters to share a bit of enthusiasm and optimism – and best practices, too. Over a dozen people from Danone, danone.communities, the Danone Ecosystem Fund and Hystra (an organisation that works with social businesses to design and implement strategies and innovative business approaches) came to hear about Living Goods, a social business that operates in Uganda to provide people with the products they need and lack. As Thierry Delepoulle,  Growth2 Director at Danone, explained in his introduction, this meeting was part of a benchmark currently being conducted by Danone Ecosystem and Hystra on inspiring social businesses and initiatives outside. Living Goods was chosen

because it is about providing health, which is at the heart of our mission, and also because they developed an incredible IT solution to monitor their business.

With this meeting, the goal for the teams at Danone and its funds was to “formalise what (they) already knew about micro-distribution” and find inspiration on how to “develop an inclusive model” that is effective business-wise as well as with the social aspects.

Filling the distribution gap for indispensable products

After a short film about the Danone Ecosystem Fund (which you can watch here), Chris Murphy, Director of Marketing & Development at Living Goods, rose to speak about the spirit and mission of Living Goods: Like Danone, we do not see the people at the bottom of the pyramid as victims, but as value conscious consumers and resilient entrepreneurs.

He explained that, while there are already many products that can save or change lives, Africa experiences a gap in the market at distribution level, which keeps these products from getting to the poorest or most remote populations. When Living Goods was created in 2007, it took inspiration from the cosmetics company Avon to build its business model: Avon started in rural America in the 1880s, where the conditions (poor access to quality goods for the villages and few opportunities for women to earn money) were strikingly similar to the context in emerging countries today. And it developed a direct-to-consumer micro-distribution system that enabled it to become a thriving $10 billion business in over 100 countries. Living Goods thus adapted the system to Ugandan villages. As explained in a film shown by Chris and his colleague Molly Christiansen, in charge of partnership & research, the social business relies on a network of women who go from door to door, teaching people how they can improve their health and wealth while selling life-changing products at affordable prices. Their product range includes nutrition products (such as fortified complementary foods for children), health products (such as medicines and oral contraceptives), consumer goods (such as soap or hygienic pads) and pro-poor innovations (such as clean cookstoves and solar lamps).

By empowering over 1,000 micro-entrepreneurs, Living Goods has already supported 105,049 pregnancies, treated 388,465 children for deadly diseases, sold over 25,000 clean-burning cookstoves, and improved the lives of countless consumers throughout East Africa.

Chris listed the four key goals and benefits of this system: helping to save lives by focusing on easily preventable and treatable diseases (malaria and diarrhoea), empowering micro-entrepreneurs to earn a living by making a difference, increasing access to innovations (both in terms of availability and affordability), and achieving financial sustainability.

Women empowerment and innovative technology

Molly gave further details about the model: every woman in the network is actually a micro-entrepreneur and operates with a franchise. They are all community members, often housewives, who earn a supplemental income with their Living Goods activity. They are trained on the various aspects of running a small business and are given branded materials (clothes, bags, product catalogues, signs for their home) to improve their visibility and credibility. They also receive health training, so that they are able to diagnose the most frequent diseases, treat some of them and, with conditions they cannot handle, refer the patients to treatment facilities. But one of the most interesting innovations implemented by Living Goods actually lies with technology: thanks to the enormous penetration of mobile phones in East Africa, Living Goods is able to use mobile technology to monitor and motivate their sales agents and market more effectively to their customers. For instance, when a Living Goods agent diagnoses someone with malaria, or learns that a woman is pregnant, she texts a simple code to a cloud-based platform, which can thus monitor whom the agents are treating, and for what. With the data collected, the server then sends automated text messages to the clients: treatment reminders, education for pregnant mothers, behaviour change communications to high-risk households, and so on. Living Goods is also using the system to broadcast product promotions, announce new product introductions, build brand equity, and drive word-of-mouth marketing.

Good ideas are better shared

All through the presentation by Chris and Molly, questions came from all directions – and they were  extremely relevant. Everyone attending had expertise in social business, and this gave rise to some very interesting discussions on how to engage the women entrepreneurs, how to chose the products and source them locally, how to handle a large portfolio of products, etc. Molly and Chris shared the challenges they are facing, notably in terms of technology: bugs are still occurring, and local habits (multiple SIM cards, shared mobile phones, etc.) make it hard to ensure that a personalised message is received and read by the right person. They see a huge opportunity in the development of mobile phone technology in Africa and are planning to integrate mobile money, training tools, and direct response marketing into their mobile platform.  In 2013, Living Goods also plans to increase its Uganda network by 60%, launch the business in Kenya, continue to drive product innovation and, finally, scale up their impact by influencing leading NGOs and companies, and convincing them to adapt their model. Molly says that Living Goods wants to be copied:

The scale of the problems is huge. We are not going to solve these problems at the scale they persist on our own. We aim to share what we have learned with others to help replicate our methods and model throughout the developing world.

They have thus started to build partnerships with other organisations, and they communicate on their model to inspire others. The future of Living Goods lies in ensuring its own sustainability and efficiency, and helping others replicate the model. We can be sure that some of the people who were in the room that afternoon will pick up on their ideas!

This post originally appeared on Danone’s Down to Earth Blog.  

Chuck Slaughter, founder and CEO of Living Goods, has been selected as a 2013 Social Entrepreneur of the Year by the Schwab Foundation. The winners—who are working in fields such as health, education, employment and the environment—were selected in recognition of their innovative approaches and potential for global impact. Chuck is one of 24 global entrepreneurs selected for the honor and one of seven US-based entrepreneurs.

He now joins a network of pioneering social entrepreneurs from organizations like BRAC, Teach for All, Riders of Health, Ushahidi, and many more inspiring organizations applying business models to drive lasting social change.

“Now that the terms social entrepreneurship and social innovation are well known, it is easy to forget that even a few short years ago they were virtually unheard of,” says Hilde Schwab. “For decades and in relative obscurity, social entrepreneurs have been doing the hard work of building trust with the poor, finding solutions to their problems and creating entire business models and organizations that take their needs into account.”    

The awardees will become part of the broader Schwab Foundation community of Social Entrepreneurs, which includes 234 social entrepreneurs from 59 countries. Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneurs are fully integrated into the events and initiatives of the World Economic Forum. 

“Social entrepreneurs are an integral community of the World Economic Forum, and an increasingly sought after one,” says David Aikman, Senior Director, World Economic Forum and Head, Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. “A growing number of corporations see income inequality and environmental problems like climate change as fundamental threats to their long-term growth. Many governments are starting to rethink the way they deliver goods and services that improve social outcomes.

“We are seeing greater appetite among other stakeholder groups of the Forum to learn from social innovation models and collaborate with social entrepreneurs in innovative ways.”

I am confident this trend will only continue to grow in the future, and the World Economic Forum is proud to be at the forefront of catalysing partnerships amongst these stakeholder groups for social and environmental change.”

For more information, visit http://wef.ch/HSSEOY13 

By Chuck Slaughter, Founder and CEO of Living Goods. This post originally appeared in Huffington Post. 

The unprecedented increase in mobile connectivity across emerging markets is captivating the world, and for good reason.

There is no shortage of reporting on the transformative impact of mobile technology in the developing world, and yet it’s worth repeating. This year, the number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the world’s human population. As I write, there is a 67% penetration rate on the continent of Africa. In Uganda, where we work, there were 14,760,923 connections in 2011, close to half of the population. And a new study from Deloitte and GMSA using Cisco data links information and communications technologies (ICTs) to national economic growth, showing that a doubling of mobile data use leads to an increase of 0.5 percentage points in GDP per capita growth rates. This is a particularly fascinating statistic, and in the years ahead planned improvements to broadband infrastructure will only continue increasing national productivity. In real terms, a 0.5 percentage point GDP increase in Uganda would amount to over $84 million.

But don’t let the mobile hype of recent years fool you. We’re still at the very early stages of realizing the full potential of ICTs to improve lives at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP). Many questions remain about how organizations across all sectors can leverage fast growing connectivity to create meaningful, sustainable impact. Last year, with the generous help of Cisco CSR Living Goods and technology partner Arthify built a pioneering mobile platform that attempts to do just that. Our network of ‘Avon-like’ micro-entrepreneurs go door-to-door selling a wide range of life-changing products like treatments for malaria and diarrhea, fortified foods, clean cook stoves, and solar lights. Our business-in-a-bag model empowers micro-entrepreneurs with all the tools and training they need to launch their own Living Goods franchise. What’s the most powerful tool in their bag? A simple, feature-free mobile phone. 

This deceptively simple device is quickly becoming the single most transformative tool for our success. Mobile phones are empowering our agents to earn more, delivering targeted health messages to clients, dramatically lowering our cost to market and monitor, enabling real time salesforce management and igniting social connections that drive impact and business success. All of these outputs collectively increase the pace and the success at which we improve the health, wealth, and productivity of the communities we serve.

Improving impact through highly targeted communications. We’ve built a robust client database of nearly every mobile number across the regions we serve, allowing us to target clients by segments, geographies, past behavior and health needs. Automated texts provide information relevant to each particular client, including drug adherence reminders, health education for pregnant women, child development information for newborn children, agent performance feedback, product promotions, agent performance tracking, clinic referral reminders, and client follow-up reminders. Marketers in developed economies, including myself, have been using customer segmentation tools like these for decades. But before the ubiquity of the mobile phone there was no way to deploy tightly targeted communication strategies in BoP markets.

Operational efficiencies through better, faster data. In the past, our agents logged all client visits, sales, follow up, and referrals on paper forms and management would wait until the following month to get last month’s data. But the mobile platform gives us access to real-time, high-quality data on trends in diagnosis, treatment, product sales, product stocks, branch activity, and agent activity. Agents use their phone to submit reports from the field using simple SMS codes. Better, faster data means better, faster decisions and operational cost-savings.

Driving demand through innovative marketing. Despite the powerful promise of pro-poor products, the vast majority remain market failures for their inability to reach a critical mass of poor consumers. Strategies that tap into the strong social networks of poor consumers and facilitate word-of-mouth marketing are the most proven performers in BoP markets. To that end our SMS platform enables us to deploy, manage, and measure targeted and time-sensitive marketing campaigns. For example, to promote a new size of clean burning cook stoves, we used SMS to power a simple customer referral campaign. We A/B tested the campaign with paired test and control markets. In the test markets, the SMS marketing campaign drove a 280% sales increase over control markets. Category halo effects were also evident as our test markets realized a 125% increase in cook stoves sizes not on promotion.

These innovations in mobile have not come free of challenges. Many of our agents share phones, so we’ve set up a program for them to purchase their own phones from us on credit. And electricity is far from ubiquitous and consistent in Uganda, so keeping phones charged is also an issue. To overcome charging issues, our agents have (and sell) solar powered phone chargers. Functional literacy has been a challenge as well, but our intensive hands-on training has helped our agents learn how to text like a teenager. Sarah Balisanyuka, our Mafubira agent, bragged, “In the beginning there were challenges, but now I’ve gotten used to the system. I send SMS reports faster than my written reports.” Sarah’s been “SMS Champion of the Month” for months on end. But earlier this year, she didn’t know how to open text messages on her phone.

A huge global shift is in the process of taking place, and it’s clearer than ever before that mobile phones are the single most transformative technology for development. We are continuing to expand our mobile platform and plan to integrate mobile payment, social networking, and CRM tools in the months and years to come to continue driving both economic and health impacts. Mobile technology is already a game-changer for Living Goods and the communities we serve, but we’re well aware this game is just getting started.

Living Goods newly opened Masaka branch welcomed, for the very first time, men to its family of micro-franchisees. Nsubuga Muhamadie is one of the first men to don the LG uniform.  But his story of redemption, renewed self-respect, and hope for the future is remarkably familiar.   

Before becoming a Better Living Promoter, Muhamadie earned a modest living as a subsistence farmer. “Farming and digging, it takes a along time to earn any money,” Muhamadie explains. “I would feel a lot of stress about money, and I’d be upset about not being able to provide for my family. If my wife would ask for money to take our child to the clinic, I couldn’t give it to her. Not being able to look after my sick child, as the head of the family, I felt very ashamed.”

In fact, the stress got so bad that Muhamadie’s wife left him, taking their child back to live with her parents. “Whatever money I earned I would send to my wife and child, so there was nothing left for me. Being separated is not good.”

But after just two weeks as a BLP, everything ‘s changed. “Now there is no stress, I have a daily income – in two weeks I have made 80,000 UGX in profit. If someone had told me two weeks ago that my life would change like this, I wouldn’t have believed them. In the training they told me, but I really didn’t expect this. I never thought anything good could happen in my life; that things could change for the better.“

“I feel so good now, and I see a big development in myself. I feel confident, I can speak to big crowds and enter people’s homes without shame, and I’m able to answer any questions my clients ask, so they put their trust in me.”

Word of Muhamadie’s newfound standing amongst his peers reached his wife’s village. “My wife is hearing that I am popular and she can see that I have started earning money, so now she wants to come back home. It makes me very happy that she’s coming back. I need my wife here to stabilise our home.” 

By Chuck Slaughter, Founder and CEO of Living Goods. This post originally appeared in Huffington Post. 

The annual Clinton Global Initiative is right around the corner and it’s already got me thinking.

Every year CGI brings leaders from all sectors together to tackle the most important issues of our time. Established in 2005 by President Bill Clinton, the mission is simple: to turn ideas into action. It’s always a highlight of my year — a chance to think big, be inspired, and connect with fellow changemakers. This year’s conference theme – Designing for Impact – has already got me thinking. I’m reminded that the critical link between design and impact, the key to turning ideas into action, is often overlooked: distribution. More specifically, designing sustainable and scalable distribution systems that can bring high-impact products and services to those who need them most. At Living Goods we apply all of our creativity and energy to designing solutions that can take on this big hairy challenge. It’s where we’ve turned our ideas into action over the last few years and, for me, it’s the missing link between good design and real impact.

Retailing in poor countries is almost perfectly fragmented; sellers have no buying power and distribution entails excessive layers of distributors and re-sellers who each pile on profit margins and transaction costs. The result? Consumers in emerging markets suffer from high prices and poor access to life-enhancing innovations. Consumer goods in these markets don’t benefit from the economies of scale that we take for granted here in the U.S. — the efficiencies that drive prices down for consumers while still supporting robust margins for retailers. Consequently, many innovative new products like clean cook stoves, solar lamps, and fortified foods are not realizing their full impact potential. Smart product design isn’t enough to achieve massive impact. To ignore the challenge of distribution and marketing is to ignore the very objective of impact.

As stated in the 2010 Booz and Co. report on Global Innovation, “there is a substantial gap between most companies’ ability to create innovative new products and their ability to successfully take them to market.” Product commercialization and distribution is not a problem unique to the Base of the Pyramid. But it is exponentially more challenging. That’s where Living Goods comes in.

Inspired by successful direct-selling models like Avon, Amway and Tupperware, we are designing a sustainable platform to dramatically scale access to a broad range of life-changing products for people living in poverty. Living Goods’ networks of “Avon-like” micro-entrepreneurs go door-to-door teaching families how to improve their health and wealth while selling life-changing products like treatments for malaria and diarrhea, fortified foods, clean cook stoves, and solar lights. We leverage the buying power of thousands of franchisees to cut out multiple layers of resellers, delivering better margins for our agents and lower prices for customers. Items are always in stock. Customers buy from neighbors they know and trust. Innovative new products can easily take advantage of our already established distribution networks instead of starting from scratch.

In recent years clever designers have innovated a wave of high-impact pro-poor products. But very few of these have successfully cracked the code leading to broad distribution. The New York Times just highlighted this very challenge in an article on Sprinkles, small sachets containing a blend of micronutrients in powder form that give iron-deficient children the nutrients they need to avoid anemia. Invented in the 1990s, today just 13.6 million of the world’s 300 million iron-deficient children have access to the product. Sprinkles have recently joined our product line, and our agents sell them alongside other products whose designers faced the same distribution challenge. We also distribute products from d.light,Barefoot Power, and Greenlight Planet who create solar energy solutions for the one in four people on the planet living without reliable electricity, helping them stay active after the sun goes down, and putting an end to the use of expensive, dirty, and dangerous kerosene. We also sell clean-burning cook stoves fromEnvirofit and Ugastove, designed for the more than 3 billion people in the world who cook with open fires. These cook stoves save customers money through reduced fuel costs, reduce emission of pollutants that can cause respiratory illnesses, and bring relief to local forests, which are being exploited for fuel. Our micro-franchise model brings every one of these products to the doorsteps of poor consumers across Uganda, marketing their benefits and selling them at affordable prices.

Of course, distribution does nothing without demand. But there is no clear path to penetrate the Base of the Pyramid. That’s why rapid innovation is a core philosophy of Living Goods. We believe that continuously testing new products, pricing, incentives, marketing, and consumer financing is the only way to crack the code to massive, sustainable impact. One of our recent tests was a free trial to convert cautious customers into buyers of new high impact home technologies like solar lights — initial tests converted over 60 percent of “triers” into buyers. We also use mobile technology to broadcast time-limited product promotions. A Living Goods SMS marketing campaign promoting a sale on high efficiency cook stoves drove a 300 percent increase in cook stove sales. In just over a year, Living Goods drove penetration of clean cook stoves to over 50 percent of families in the villages we serve. This is exactly the sort of impact we strive for and aim to grow over time with new products and new markets.

At Living Goods we are aiming to radically disrupt the status quo and bring game-changing improvements to the lives of the poor. Even if we are wildly successful we can’t possibly deliver that scale of change alone. That’s why we open our playbook to the world. We’re open-sourcing our model, methods and tools and we encourage visionary consumer businesses, ambitious social entrepreneurs, and forward-thinking NGOs to learn from us and deliver vital products and services to the billions of people living in poverty. To accelerate this effort we launched a replication services team to support collaborations with like-minded partners across all sectors. We’re looking for partners to join us in building a thriving consumer market in severely underserved communities. No one company, NGO, or government can do this alone.

The challenge ahead is daunting, but the opportunity to design distribution platforms that better serve the billions of people living in poverty is at hand. I remain determined that together we can close the gap between design and impact — turning ideas into action, and giving billions of people access to smart new products that can change their lives.

Earlier this year, we rolled out a new mobile phone based reporting program to deepen our health impacts and drive more sales to our agents.  Our agents in Mafubira enthusiastically adopted the new SMS reporting system, led by Sarah Balisanyuka.  Sarah has won the “SMS Champion of the Month” for three consecutive months. An impressive achievement in its own right, made downright astonishing after learning that just a few months ago Sarah didn’t know how to use SMS on her phone.

Our innovative platform enables agents to enter simple SMS codes to report treatments for malaria, diarrhea, and respiratory infection directly from the field. After agents send a treatment SMS, their client receives a free sequence of automated treatment adherence reminders.  Simple reminders to complete the course of treatment can dramatically improve health impact.  Agents also use SMS to register pregnant women and newborn children in their community.  Once enrolled, these clients receive automated stage and age appropriate SMS messages to promote a healthy pregnancy and happy baby.  These free SMS services improve our health impact and they help our agents build stronger customer relationships that drive more treatments and sales her way.

“I really think the mobile system strengthens the relationship I have with the community,” Sarah exclaimed. “It adds to the friendship, people get a happy surprise when they receive a SMS from Living Goods, which supports my in-person interactions.” But more importantly, “it helps improve impact when we treat malaria or provide antenatal care for pregnant women.”

Shaminah is eight months pregnant and just bought a Maama Kit from Sarah. “I think the texts are impressive; no one else does that. I like the info I received about pregnancy and feeding and how to best care for my new born.”

Another big fan of the SMS system is Miriam, who supports 15 children – some her own, some are dependents. “With all these children, someone is always sick with malaria or cough or diarrhea,” says Miriam. “When I buy malaria treatment from Sarah I receive daily texts to remind me to complete the dosage. It makes me very happy, it shows me that Living Goods cares about me very much.”

Sarah admits it took some time to learn how to use SMS. “In the beginning there were challenges, but now I’ve gotten used to the system.  I send SMS reports faster than my written reports.”   Keeping her phone charged is the only thing that stands in her way now. Naturally, Sarah charges her heavily used phone with the solar charger she bought from Living Goods.

> Learn more about how we’re using mobile technology to empower our entrepreneurs.

“Because I am a learned man, I feel that I must lead by example,” explains Paul. “When people come to visit and see some of the products I have bought from Harriet, my Living Goods Community Health Promoter, they always admire them and are encouraged to buy for themselves. Paul is Harriet’s best customer and a model client.  At a recent visit he told us about how the d.light solar lamp he bought from Living Goods is improving his health, household savings, and helping his children stay focused on their schoolwork.

“Power is a big problem here, we are on the national grid now but it is not very reliable. I am lucky that I have an inverter, but it is not very efficient because I have to drive for 5km to charge the battery. And the paraffin lamps are expensive to use and give off a lot of bad smoke. In fact, I am convinced it is because of those lamps that I have chest complaints and eye problems; they’re just not good for your health. But the d.light solar lamp is changing all that. I just leave it outside to charge in the day, put it on a hook inside in the evening and it lights up the whole room. I use it every day; it is a must-use product for us. I have five children and seven dependents, and they need a proper – and healthy – source of light to do their homework. With the solar lamp, they can read properly and it lasts for hours – they really like it, they want me to buy another one. Even though 110,000 UGX is quite an investment, I don’t think it is too expensive. Before, with the paraffin lamps, I would spend at least 15,000 UGX per week on fuel so the investment is quickly earned back. And most importantly, the room is no longer filled with bad smoke every night!”

Being the shrewd saleswoman that she is, Harriet brought along a sample of the Envirofit wood stove in the hope that Paul might be interested. And she is not wrong. Paul studies it with great interest and enthusiasm and immediately says, “I want one of these, the one we have now burns everything and leaves dirt and ashes in the food – it is not befitting of the standard of living that I wish to display as a role model. I have to think of my children; the example I am setting for them and what I will be leaving behind when I’m gone. I have a lot of fruit trees on my land, but if I keep cutting them all down for firewood and to make charcoal, there will be nothing left for them. I believe in efficiency, and I can tell that this stove will use a lot less wood because the way it has been designed. I have to be economical and think of he environment for my children.”

In Uganda, malaria is the main cause of maternal mortality and miscarriage – a sad statistic that came very close to including 17-year-old Faridah Nalugenge. Seven months into her pregnancy, Faridah was infected with the potentially fatal parasite and went to her local health centre for treatment. “I felt very sick,” she says. “I was shivering and had bad pains in my stomach. I was scared because I knew malaria is dangerous for pregnant women. At the health centre they gave me Lumartem and told me to take four tablets straight away, and another four in the evening, which I did.”

Lumartem, however, is not suitable for treating pregnant women; a shocking error all too common, especially in rural clinics where there is a lack of skilled medical professionals. Later that night, Faridah’s abdominal pain increased and she started bleeding. At 5am, with no signs of improvement, Faridah and her mother went to their local Living Goods Community Health Promoter, Joyce, who took them to Katende Health Centre, a better-equipped facility in town, and a Living Goods partner clinic.

Faridah was admitted and put on a drip to dilute the effects of the wrongly prescribed drug, after which she received the proper medication. “I immediately felt better,” says Faridah. “The pain, shivering, and bleeding stopped and I could feel the baby moving again. I felt safe at the clinic, I am very grateful that Joyce took me there.” After one week Faridah was discharged, relieved to be back home, the baby still safe in her womb. The relief, though, was short-lived. After just three weeks, now almost full term, Faridah felt contractions and started bleeding again. “The bleeding was too much, so I went to see Joyce, who got a midwife from another village to come and examine me.”

The midwife advised them to go to Kampala to one of the main hospitals as the complications were serious and she might need surgery. By 8pm Joyce, Faridah, and her mother arrived at Rubaga Hospital, where she was once again admitted and put on a drip to stop the bleeding. When the doctor examined her in the morning, he immediately performed an emergency C-section and the baby was rushed to intensive care. Mother and baby stayed in the hospital for 10 days, during which time Joyce stayed in touch with them via telephone. “She came to see us as soon as we were back home, and still comes to check up on us and monitor the baby. Thank God for Joyce, without her I fear I wouldn’t have gotten the help I needed.”