Amama has lived in a rural region of northern Ghana all her life. In 2022, she went into labor with her first child. Women traditionally give birth at home with the help of a local birthing attendant, but Amama experienced last-minute complications, and the decision was made to go to a hospital. Unfortunately, there were no ambulances in the community and the nearest hospital was 30 minutes away, so Amama was forced to take a motorcycle taxi, leaving her husband and caregiver behind.
Amama spent the next 30 minutes travelling over bumpy dirt roads to get to the hospital. She was in pain and afraid. When she arrived, she learned her child had not survived.
Unfortunately, Amama’s story is not unique. Around the world, more than 700 women die every day due to preventable pregnancy and childbirth complications. A lack of transportation to hospitals contributes to those deaths.
Moving Health was founded by MIT students to give people like Amama a safer way to get to the hospital. The company, which was started as part of a class at MIT D-Lab, works with local communities in rural Ghana to offer a network of motorized tricycle ambulances to communities that lack emergency transportation options.
The locally made ambulances are designed for the challenging terrain of rural Ghana, equipped with medical supplies, and have space for caregivers and family members.
“We’re providing the first rural-focused emergency transportation network,” says Moving Health CEO and co-founder Emily Young ’18. “We’re trying to provide emergency transportation coverage for less cost and with a vehicle tailored to local needs. When we first started, a report estimated there were 55 ambulances in the country of over 30 million people. Now, there is more coverage, but still the last mile areas of the country do not have access to reliable emergency transportation.”
Today, Moving Health’s ambulances and emergency transportation network cover more than 100,000 people in northern Ghana who previously lacked reliable medical transportation.
One of those people is Amama. During her most recent pregnancy, she was able to take a Moving Health ambulance to the hospital. This time, she travelled in a sanitary environment equipped with medical supplies and surrounded by loved ones. When she arrived, she gave birth to healthy twins.
From class project to company
Young and Sade Nabahe ’17, SM ’21 met while taking Course 2.722J (D-Lab: Design), which challenges students to think like engineering consultants on international projects. Their group worked on ways to transport pregnant women in remote areas of Tanzania to hospitals more safely and quickly. Young credits D-Lab instructor Matt McCambridge with helping students explore the project outside of class. Fellow Moving Health co-founder Eva Boal ’18 joined the effort the following year.
The early idea was to build a trailer that could attach to any motorcycle and be used to transport women. Following the early class projects, the students received funding from MIT’s PKG Center and the MIT Undergraduate Giving Campaign, which they used to travel to Tanzania in the following year’s Independent Activities Period (IAP). That’s when they built their first prototype in the field.
The founders realized they needed to better understand the problem from the perspective of locals and interviewed over 250 pregnant women, clinicians, motorcycle drivers, and birth attendants.
“We wanted to make sure the community was leading the charge to design what this solution should be. We had to learn more from the community about why emergency transportation doesn’t work in these areas,” Young says. “We ended up redesigning our vehicle completely.”
Following their graduation from MIT in 2018, the founders bought one-way tickets to Tanzania and deployed a new prototype. A big part of their plans was creating a product that could be manufactured by the community to support the local economy.
Nabahe and Boal left the company in 2020, but word spread of Moving Health’s mission, and Young received messages from organizations in about 15 different countries interested in expanding the company’s trials.
Young found the most alignment in Ghana, where she met two local engineers, Ambra Jiberu and Sufiyanu Imoro, who were building cars from scratch and inventing innovative agricultural technologies. With these two engineers joining the team, she was confident they had the team to build a solution in Ghana.
Taking what they’d learned in Tanzania, the new team set up hundreds of interviews and focus groups to understand the Ghanaian health system. The team redesigned their product to be a fully motorized tricycle based on the most common mode of transportation in northern Ghana. Today Moving Health focuses solely on Ghana, with local manufacturing and day-to-day operations led by Country Director and CTO Isaac Quansah.
Moving Health is focused on building a holistic emergency transportation network. To do this, Moving Health’s team sets up community-run dispatch systems, which involves organizing emergency phone numbers, training community health workers, dispatchers, and drivers, and integrating all of that within the existing health care system. The company also conducts educational campaigns in the communities it serves.
Moving Health officially launched its ambulances in 2023. The ambulance has an enclosed space for patients, family members, and medical providers and includes a removable stretcher along with supplies like first aid equipment, oxygen, IVs, and more. It costs about one-tenth the price of a traditional ambulance.
“We’ve built a really cool, small-volume manufacturing facility, led by our local engineering team, that has incredible quality,” Young says. “We also have an apprenticeship program that our two lead engineers run that allows young people to learn more hard skills. We want to make sure we’re providing economic opportunities in these communities. It’s very much a Ghanaian-made solution.”
Unlike the national ambulances, Moving Health’s ambulances are stationed in rural communities, at community health centers, to enable faster response times.
“When the ambulances are stationed in these people’s communities, at their local health centers, it makes all the difference,” Young says. “We’re trying to create an emergency transportation solution that is not only geared toward rural areas, but also focused on pregnancy and prioritizing women’s voices about what actually works in these areas.”
A lifeline for mothers
When Young first got to Ghana, she met Sahada, a local woman who shared the story of her first birth at the age of 18. Sahada had intended to give birth in her community with the help of a local birthing attendant, but she began experiencing so much pain during labor the attendant advised her to go to the nearest hospital. With no ambulances or vehicles in town, Sahada’s husband called a motorcycle driver, who took her alone on the three-hour drive to the nearest hospital.
“It was rainy, extremely muddy, and she was in a lot of pain,” Young recounts. “She was already really worried for her baby, and then the bike slips and they crash. They get back on, covered in mud, she has no idea if the baby survived, and finally gets to the maternity ward.”
Sahada was able to give birth to a healthy baby boy, but her story stuck with Young.
“The experience was extremely traumatic, and what’s really crazy is that counts as a successful birth statistic,” Young says. “We hear that kind of story a lot.”
This year, Moving Health plans to expand into a new region of northern Ghana. The team is also exploring other ways their network can provide health care to rural regions. But no matter how the company evolves, the team remain grateful to have seen their D-Lab project turn into such an impactful solution.
“Our long-term vision is to prove that this can work on a national level and supplement the existing health system,” Young says. “Then we’re excited to explore mobile health care outreach and other transportation solutions. We’ve always been focused on maternal health, but we’re staying cognizant of other community ideas that might be able to help improve health care more broadly.”