Africa: Innovations That Could Save 1.2 Million Lives Showcased

Ten innovations that could save the lives of 1.2 million children and mothers by the end of 2015 and help achieve the health-related Millennium Development Goals have been highlighted in a recent report by a US-based international NGO.

PATH worked with public and private institutions to produce a shortlist of promising low-cost health innovations and then used a modelling tool to estimate how many lives could be saved if they were implemented in developing nations.

The modelling is based on the innovations' use in the 75 highest-burden countries for maternal, newborn and child death, says Joy Lawn, a paediatrician at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, United Kingdom, who was involved in developing the modelling tool.

"The 75 countries include all low and most middle income countries and over 95 per cent of all the world's maternal newborn and child deaths," says Lawn.

She says the PATH used data on the causes of deaths of children and mothers, and the coverage of each planned or ongoing health intervention, to help estimate the number of lives each innovation could save.

"The ten innovations are not equal in their impact," Lawn tells SciDev.Net. "Some are already out there and starting to make a big difference, while others are still in pilot studies."

Amie Batson, chief strategy officer at PATH, says the shortlist highlights "the power of innovations to make change".

"We could have had 15 or 20, but we focused on what was going to be the most impactful and provided a sense to the community about the array of interventions," Batson tells SciDev.Net.

These innovations include ROTAVAC, a vaccine against the diarrhoea-causing rotavirus that was developed by a team led by the Indian government, and a diarrhoea-treatment-and-prevention kit (Kit Yamoyo) designed by UK charity ColaLife.

Kit Yamoyo (meaning kit of life in Chichewa language) makes use of drink firm Coca-Cola's distribution chain to reach remote areas in Zambia.

"I saw that you could get a Coca-Cola everywhere but you could not get medicine to treat a child with diarrhoea," Simon Berry, founder and CEO of ColaLife, tells SciDev.Net. Kit Yamoyo is designed to sit in empty spaces between soft drink bottles in full crates.