Hon. Rebecca Joshua Okwaci, South Sudan Minister of Telecommunications and Postal Services gives an overall award to TotoHealth’s Executive Director Felix Kimaru at Connected East Africa.
TotoHealth has won this year’s Vision 2030 Innovation awards sponsored by Konza Techno City at The Connected East Africa Summit.
Totohealth is a social enterprise that utilizes mobile technology (SMS and Voice) to allow parents from marginalized communities to monitor the development of their children or pregnant mothers to monitor their pregnancy.
To make this happen, Totohealth has built an adaptive platform that automatically advices parents based on how old their child is, stage of pregnancy, location where the parent comes from and what health conditions the child has. The platform has had tremendous success since inception in June 2014 with over 6,000 parents, 750 Community Health Workers and 8 organisations registered and utilizing it. The system works over SMS and Voice on both smart-phones and basic feature phones.
Other winners in this year’s innovation awards were: Boresha under Education and Training Category, Keja Hunt under Housing and Urbanization Category, Kuhustle under IT and Telecoms Category, Mchanga under Financial Services Category, TotoHealth under HealthCare Delivery and mShamba under Local and International Trade.
The winners got a free .ke domain and a three year free website hosting at KENIC, a two month free advertisisng on Elimu TV and the overall winner would receive a laptop fully assembled at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology.
The Vision 2030 Innovation Awards seek to recognize and celebrate Kenyans, who have developed ICT solutions that drive economic growth and social development. The Awards are designed to highlight innovations steering development in line with Kenya’s blueprint vision to build a vibrant middle income economy by the year 2030. The awards cover two of the three key pillars of Vision 2030; Economic and Social pillars.
Last year the overall innovation award went to Eneza Education which aims to create a network of parents, students and teachers to provide a tailored educational experience specific for each child. Every child is different and learns in a different way and pace. Eneza provides the opportunity for the child to engage his or her teachers directly, in a customized way and learn better.
The organisation has grown to over 391,000 students on its platform across 2,000 schools in Kenya including, refugee camps. There are also new features intended to get parents and teachers more involved in the project.
