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A start-up is raising hope for blood shortages in Senegal

Senegal’s club of techpreneurs is showing increasing capacity to deal with everyday issues. One of the many has developed an application to manage the rising incidence of blood scarcity in the tiny West African country

Published

6 years ago

June 18, 2018

Africa News Watch

An interface called Hope is saving lives by offering a solution to blood shortages in Senegal.

“Hope is a Web-based and mobile digital platform that allows blood banks and other healthcare facilities to manage blood stocks and to communicate interactively at any time with blood donors, while raising awareness of the importance of giving blood,” said Cameroonian engineer Evelyne Ines Ntonga.

She is the co-founder of Diambars Mobiles, a start-up that launched Hope, with Mr Jean Luc Semedo of Senegal.

Both are alumni of the Multinational Telecommunications School of Dakar.

The engineers have created a form of ongoing interaction between blood banks and donors.

The platform includes a mobile app that allows users to send text messages and conduct voice calls in a variety of local languages so that Hope can reach more people.

Families and healthcare facilities often face a race against time when looking for a donor with a rare blood type.

“When an urgent situation arises, the platform sends emergency SMS messages to all compatible donors in the same geographical area,” Ms Ntonga said.

Hope is well-adapted to large healthcare facilities such as the National Centre for Blood Transfusion of Senegal, which hosted the pilot phase of the project for seven months in 2016.

“During this period, we reached nearly 30,000 people across all our platforms. What’s more, thanks to our solution, the number of blood donations in this centre has more than tripled,” said Ms Ntonga.

The start-up won the 2015 Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award from mobile network operator Tigo and Swedish NGO Reach For Change. The innovation also received the Global South eHealth Observatory Award from the Pierre Fabre Foundation.

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Nigeria wants managers for proposed $10 billion diaspora fund

Published

7 hours ago

April 28, 2024

Ifeoluwa Dada

A tender paper shows that Nigeria is looking for fund managers for a $10 billion diaspora fund to bring in dollars and foreign investment for the economy.

The fund wants to pool the billions of dollars that its people send back to the country every month so that they can be used for local investments in things like healthcare, education, and infrastructure.

The World Bank says that Nigeria got more than $20 billion in payments from people living outside of Nigeria last year.

The Ministry of Industry and Trade in Nigeria said in a public post that it was looking for “fund managers for the development and establishment of a multisectoral, multilateral private sector-led investment fund to form the $10 billion Nigeria Diaspora Fund.”

The tender paper said that the fund manager’s job is to plan and set up the fund’s legal, operational, financial, and administrative structures.

The investment is intended to last for three to five years, and then more money will be put in after that. The government said the fund would last for 10 years and could be used for an extra two years.

The trade ministry’s tender said that people who want to run the fund must have done business in Nigeria in the last five years and must have a track record of raising money and running big, profitable venture capital funds.

Anglo-American turned down BHP Group’s $39 billion takeover offer on Friday, saying it was way too low for the London-listed company and its future.

In a statement, Minister of Industry and Trade Doris Anite said that it was a “once-in-a-lifetime chance for our citizens in the diaspora to drive Nigeria’s economic growth.”

The naira is under pressure because of a lack of foreign currency because of lower crude oil exports. This has led companies and people to buy dollars on the black market.

Nigeria is going to issue migrant bonds later this year to bring in even more foreign currency.

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World Bank grants Malawi $57.6 million for food crisis

Published

1 day ago

April 27, 2024

Ifeoluwa Dada

As a response to its food crisis, the World Bank said on Friday that it would give Malawi $57.6 million in “quick release” grants.

“This support comes in the context of the severe food crisis the country is suffering due to El Niño conditions in the wider southern Africa region,” the World Bank said in a statement.

“A series of intense disaster events over the last few years has left almost no time for the country to recover and has resulted in a severe erosion of food security at the national level.”

Malawi is one of the least developed countries in the world. It is ranked 170 out of 187 countries in the 2010 Human Development Index. Almost 16 million people live there, and 90% of them make less than $2 a day. That’s 53% of the total population.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says that 46,000 children in Malawi are seriously malnourished. In 2023, UNICEF said that more than 500,000 Malawian children were at risk of not getting enough food.

Now, Malawi has a lot of programs in place to deal with things like poverty, and climate change, and to make the business and agriculture more diverse.