A peek into Impact Consultancy: Tiia Sinisalo’s experience at Dawa Health

Impact Consultancy connects university students with African startups for mutually beneficial and meaningful collaborations. A telling example is a consultancy of business student Tiia Sinisalo’s for Zambian startup Dawa Health, a cooperation that bore fruit on a professional and human level.

Tiia Sinisalo, a university student who has conducted her Impact Consultancy via Ambitious.Africa for Zambian startup Dawa Health.

The success of this experience was no coincidence for Dawa Health and Tiia. The Aalto University student came on board the Dawa team with the needed savoir-faire. She accompanied them for two months during which she assisted the startup elaborating its marketing strategy for the next two years.

Dawa Health’s mission surely resonated with Tiia as it is an ambitious and laudable one: tackling the scourge of maternal mortality in Zambia by providing local pregnant women remote health care alternatives, compensating for the lack of health infrastructure and workforce in the region.

The Zambian startup does so with both software and hardware. The software consists in an AI-based mobile platform that provides week on week advice for a safe pregnancy, as well as a multilingual chatbot that answers the mother’s pregnancy-related questions; as to the hardware, it is a self-monitoring kit with which the mother self-checks several metrics such as blood pressure, blood sugar levels, urine protein levels and pregnancy-related complications. This data is subsequently sent to a doctor who offers remote health care insight. It is also used for reducing the response time to emergency cases in case of complications.

Such innovative initiatives are crucial to alleviate the challenges that the Zambian health sector faces. Indeed, the number of maternal deaths in the country has been worryingly on the rise: more than eight women die every single day from pregnancy complication, and only 29% of pregnant mothers have access to good antenatal care. Furthermore, more than 900.000 Zambian women give birth annually, and more than half of them reside in rural areas, where medical care accessibility is even more difficult.

The DawaMom app, developed by Dawa Health, is assisting African women access remote maternal health.

The two co-founders of Dawa Health, Tafadzwa Munzwa and Chungu Chama, are a complementary duo: the first is a medical student, who instigated the project after seeing his cousin struggling to get quality antenatal care, whereas the second is a computer science student who brings his technical knowledge to the table. Three years after starting their project, they joined the Impact Consultancy program to get insight into the marketing side of things, and that is when they were put in touch with Tiia Sinisalo.

During her consultancy, Tiia carried out several important tasks. She relished some of the responsibilities she was assigned, such as the ability to brainstorm business ideas for the institution and the conception of a marketing plan for a period of 24 months. Another achievement that she was particularly proud of was the impressive pitch she developed for Dawa’s application to participate in Slush 2021, an international tech networking event made for connecting startup owners and investors. Not only did she live up to the opportunity, but Dawa managed to qualify for the competition. It means that the digital health platform will be able to present its concept to investors in Helsinki in 2021.

Naturally, the experience had its challenges for Dawa Health and Tiia who managed to overcome them with efficient communication, weekly meetings, and eagerness to exchange feedback. Both were pleased with their overall collaboration that proved to be professionally and personally enriching. It epitomized the Impact Consultancy’s aim of having Nordic students put into practice their academic skills and knowledge to solve real-life problems. It also proved that geographical distance and differences in life experience can be harnessed for achieving common goals, rather than being hurdles in the way.

By Naomi Nkhoma