Today at the Connected Kenya Summit, Totohealth won the Konza ICT Innovation Awards 2015 as the Overall Winner to help end infant mortality in Africa.
Totohealth.net, 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.
The best compnay in the Educational and Training went to Boresha Limited, a smart series educational software by Manuel Mabia Watindi. The firm has developed an 8:4:4 educational content for Kenyan children for use on laptops, smart phones, tablets and desktop PCs.
The Financial services category was won by MobiChanga Limited or M-changa allows anyone with a basic feature phone and/or web access to leverage their mobile wallet and create a fundraiser in minutes. Once created, M-Changa’s suite of mobile tools allows the customer to effortlessly engage and promote his/her cause via SMS and receive donations through mobile money comprising of MPesa, Airtel Money and PayPal.
No other product in the market focuses on end-to-end fundraiser management. Far from a simple payment platform, the ability to engage, build and reuse the community as a user’s needs change is one of the key value propositions of M-Changa. Funds security on the custody of funds as well as transparency features, give both the fundraiser and donor unprecedented visibility of the entire fundraising community transactions, which increases the viability for hosting fundraisers.
Under the Health Care Delivery category, Totohealth.net, 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 won. 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.Nailab’s Kejahunt won the Housing and Urbanization category. Kejahunt.com is an online property listing platform built to cater for the middle and low income earning groups. Kejahunt makes house searching for this group easy and fast by providing information on vacant houses from as low as Ksh.5,000. The platform provides such pertinent details on property including the geographic location, a description of its features and the contacts of the landlord. With Kejahunt, users save time and financial resources spent physically searching for a home.Kejahunt caters for the larger population in Kenya which other online property listing platforms have not tapped into. It goes as far as providing users with a roommate feature that allows one to search for someone with whom to cost share the rent. It also provides a custom search that connects to correspondents of the organisation who can assist the users to find exactly what they need if the house cannot be found on the Kejahunt platform.
Nailab’s Kuhustle won the It and Telecoms category. Kuhustle.com is an online community that aims at creating and carrying out jobs, digitally. Kuhustle offers project management on online jobs in Kenya and the larger African community to ensure that they are fully delivered to clients. The platform has acquired more than 2,000 jobs in the last 6 months with the most commonly listed jobs ranging between a budget of Ksh. 100,000- 250 000.The Local and International Trade was won by M-shamba Ltd. M-shamba provides online information to smallholder farmers on growing particular crops, service providers in a given location and links the farmers to a market for their produce. The platform utilizes the various features of a mobile phone (SMS, USSD and mobile app) and a web platform. M-shamba also gives farmer groups, government agencies and NGO’s working with farmers a platform where they can easily communicate to each other on various issues such as climate change adaptation, use of new farming technologies and production.
M-shamba is unique because it uses various features of mobile phones to provide real time and customized extension information to the smallholder farmers. It uses the most basic of technologies (SMS and USSD) to provide a reliable means of communication. Through this model of providing information, smallholder farmers are cushioned from paying heavily for a range of services and collaborations. The model is also creating a variety of jobs along the agricultural value chain.
Three other companies were also named winners under the special mention category for their contributions to the society.
Kitchen Soko, founded by Winston Wachanga Warui got a special mention for its product to help small-holder farmers linking them directly to the consumers and vice versa. This platform offers a marketplace to enable customers to buy from local farms and vendors and also handles all the logistics associated with packaging of their orders and handling delivery. It enables a customer to order online from a wide selection of food producers and food makers. The produce is harvested such as vegetables, or prepared fresh such as meats and delivered to the customers in a single order.
Kitchen Soko provides a smart alternative to traditional food shopping where consumers do not have to physically go to the market to shop for their food and groceries. The operating principle is to put markets at the centre of all production, processing, product development and packaging. This is done by organizing local food producers into a single market space where they can connect with their customers; ensuring production, processing and packaging meet high market standards and good practices; and enabling farmers to focus on farming as the platform handles market access and transactions on their behalf.
Kenyalaw.org, was also named under the special mention category.
Kenya Law is an online edition of the Laws of Kenya is the first database of its kind in Kenya. The system runs on an eXist XML native database and uses WSO2 Middleware to seamlessly integrate a document management system, workflow system and document transformers to generate output documents. The database has the unique Point-In-Time functionality. This feature allows you to navigate back in time to see what an Act of Parliament may have looked like in its previously amended forms.
Funkidz.co.ke, runs Kidz-Go-Tech, a program aimed at nurturing innovation and creativity in children aged between 6 – 17 years through practical, hands-on science and technology fun-filled experiments. The program disseminates information to children on various complex technologies in the world through simple application based experiments. The program serves to complement the current education curriculum, specifically the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) related disciplines through experimental learning with a view to leapfrog the current education curriculum.Many of the children who attend the program begin to appreciate the immense value of technology in its application to solve problems and build innovative solutions. The program aims to simulate a sensory and experiential learning environment. The company has created the first prototype of a K-robot which is made in Kenya. The robot is a teacher’s assistant and a friend to children at school, home and community centres. “K” is currently able to project on any surface and will soon be fully automated and powered by solar.