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Context is everything.  Words and terms like handicapped, poor and third world were once commonplace in our field, used without any appreciation of the value judgements attached to them.  Now we know better.  Rather than describing what we do as providing services to the poor, we work with communities to build their capacity.   

In India, your name alone can signify your religion, caste, and place of origin.  Often, women carry their father’s name as their middle name, and have to change their name in marriage.  Changing your name in this context becomes a political act, one that I embraced when I left home for college, and one which many Indian women embrace to be seen as separate from their families.

Our organization was founded by Gustav Praekelt in South Africa 2007 as the offspring of the digital marketing and design agency which also bore his name, Praekelt Consulting. The word Foundation was used to distinguish us from our for-profit sister company, but at the time it was hard to imagine that less than ten years later we would grow to be as large as Praekelt Consulting, running as many projects, staffed by a globally-distributed team with diverse backgrounds.

Now, the word Foundation no longer describes who we are. We operate entirely independently from Praekelt Consulting. The funding for our projects comes not from Gustav Praekelt or a generous endowment, but from partners like UNICEF, USAID, Johnson & Johnson, Ford Foundation and UNFPA.

As we embark on a new period in the growth of our organization the time has come to change our name to more clearly communicate who we are. Retaining the word Praekelt allows us to retain our heritage. While the addition of .org communicates our commitment to social change and our identity as an organization that develops digital technologies.

In addition to changing our name we’re also entering a new stage of development across our products and projects. This includes launching our first batch of sites built by our Free Basics Incubator graduates.  We are expanding Tune Me – our youth sexual and reproductive health platform – to four new countries, and also recently launched the first chatbot for maternal health in Africa.

These projects represent the beginnings of the ambitious and innovative work we are preparing for over the next few years.  By changing our name we have the opportunity to introduce or even re-introduce ourselves to existing and potential partners. We hope you take the time to get to know us again.

– Ambika Samarthya-Howard, Head of Communications

Since March 2015, Zelda Moran has worked with founder Peter Klatsky and an implementing partner, Baylor Uganda, on Mama Rescue: a cloud-based transport voucher and emergency dispatch system improving access to transport for mothers in rural Uganda. Deaths from common complications like hemorrhage, eclampsia, sepsis, and birth asphyxia, along with lifelong morbidities such as fistula are all preventable if mothers and their babies reach care quickly.

After hearing about the impact of Mama Rescue first-hand from from midwives and transport providers in May of last year, UNICEF and the Ugandan Ministry of Health decided that the Mama Rescue voucher platform should be scaled up and incorporated into FamilyConnect, a national eHealth program developed by UNICEF and Praekelt Foundation set to launch in 2017. Over the last few weeks, Praekelt, Moran, and the Mama Rescue team have worked together to explore how to scale this life-saving technology to the entire country of Uganda and even beyond potentially.

I asked Zelda to share how she became involved with Mama Rescue and her vision for its future.

“I’ve heard stories of women walking for hours toward health facilities until they finally give birth on the side of the road.  I’ve heard stories of women who labor at home because transport is too difficult to find or afford. Now, I hear stories of women who call for transport as soon as they feel labor pains, and are referred to the hospital as soon as anything goes wrong.”

“We’ve always dreamed of bringing Mama Rescue beyond its pilot district of Kasese,” said Zelda, “and we have learned that they are a few key elements to successfully scaling technology.” 

In the course of her work, Zelda has identified three keys to scaling technology in Africa:

The popular shoe brand Toms was founded in 2006 with the premise that for every pair of shoes you buy, they would give one to a needy person in the developing world. This sounded like the peak of corporate community involvement, until a few years ago when people realized their impact was more harmful than helpful.  For one thing, the shoes took away from local businesses.  Also, with the limited amount of shoes, children competed for pairs, creating tension and inequity amongst groups. Sometimes the best intentions produce unintended consequences.

In 2010, in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti, Alanna Shaikh – a blogger at Aidwatch – wrote a scathing commentary titled Nobody Wants Your Old Shoes: How Not To Help in Haiti. In it she declared, “Only the people on the ground know what’s actually necessary; those of us in the rest of the world can only guess.”

Since 2012, Praekelt Foundation’s open source mobile messaging platform, Vumi, has sent more than 100 million messages to tens of millions of people across the world, providing them with essential and potentially life-saving information.  The journey has not always been easy, however. 

Each time we launched Vumi in a new country, our engineering team had to grapple with the specific technical specifications for each mobile network operator (MNO). Managing these integrations became a full-time job in itself and the complexity of each new integration made it difficult to respond to urgent problems – not only for Praekelt Foundation, but for others too. 

As the Ebola crisis demonstrated, integrating with MNOs is a cumbersome, time-consuming process and presents a significant obstacle to any organisation looking to develop and deploy mobile services at speed. The fact that aid agencies were unable to plug into mobile networks without first setting up integrations meant that it took far too long for vital information to be collected and disseminated via mobile.

For this reason, and for others, it became apparent that a new solution to integrating wth mobile networks was needed – a single platform that could simplify connectivity across networks, manage multiple data streams, respond to emerging data sovereignty laws and assure data security.  Easy, right?

Behind all great technology platforms, user interfaces, and complex back-end systems lie dedicated people.  As we expand our offerings and partnerships, we need exceptional talent and people who share our values.  With this in mind, we created our Cape Town internship program in 2011 to provide graduates with an opportunity to experience our work environment and get to grips with our challenging projects.  This year we had five interns working with our Engineering and Service Design teams in Cape Town.

Praekelt’s unique approach to software development, service design, and social change comes through in not only what we do, but how we do it.  Engineering intern Wim Keirsgieter described the confidence he developed from the program: “It’s shown me that taking bold steps is not half as daunting as it seems. It’s also removed any doubt I might have had that software development is what I want to do.”  The program reminded engineering intern Munsanje Mweene that “software exists to solve human problems. It is easy to lose sight of that while banging away at code.”

Pilotitis [pahy-luht-ahy-tis] – the inability to break out of pilot stage.

The term, a coinage which has found widespread use the last few years, was frequently heard at the GSMA mHealth Summit in South Africa at the end of May 2012 when organisations and international development leaders spoke about how the difficulty in taking projects beyond the pilot stage was holding back mobile health in low and middle income countries.

The solution? Build for scale and sustainability from the start.

Fast forward four years, and we return to South Africa for the annual International AIDS Conference, where we are launching a bot for Messenger for the National Department of Health’s MomConnect platform.

As the Praekelt Foundation prepares for next week’s AIDS conference in Durban, I reached out to my friends from NGOs around the world.  Having recently joined the comms team,  I was hoping this would serve as an opportunity to connect like minded development people together, especially since HIV has been the central focus of most of my work in India and Nigeria since 2005.

Instead the responses I received were indifferent. One friend at an agriculture focused NGO said “We are hardly working in AIDS relief anymore.” Another wrote: “HIV is no longer in vogue! I don’t even think about it anymore.  I used to be obsessed with it.”

I was surprised to see such a lack of interest in what continues to remain a large global health issue impacting millions. HIV today is the largest killer amongst adolescents in Africa, and the second largest worldwide. What happened to what was once the darling cause of the development sector?

Praekelt Foundation’s Marcha Bekker travelled to Israel in April to take part in the inaugural Discovery Health Innovation Exchange trip. Read her first-hand account of this inspiring journey below.

The Discovery Health Innovation Exchange trip saw a group of South Africans entrepreneurs and innovators travel to Israel to meet with like-minded entrepreneurs who are changing the way the world approaches health, healing and wellness.

By sponsoring the exchange, Discovery Health wanted to achieve 3 goals: to expose South African entrepreneurs and organisations working in the health sector to new strategies and innovations; to create opportunities to partner with Israeli innovators and investors; and to inspire the South African teams to use technology in new, potentially ground-breaking ways.

Today at the F8 Facebook Developer Conference, Mark Zuckerberg announced new additions to Facebook Messenger—and Praekelt Foundation will be one of the first organizations in the world to make use of them. 

Praekelt Foundation will create its own chatbots for Facebook Messenger, ensuring that people living in the developing world are able to take advantage of this latest innovation from Facebook.  We’ll be providing essential information and services to millions, at a fraction of the cost of traditional mobile messaging campaigns.