Week 16 - Final week in Uganda

The church of Kibaale

Tomorrow, the final and third week of our field research in Uganda will end and Jozine and Mirte will fly back to The Netherlands. The weeks has been an amazing experience with many new and valuable insights for our project.

Our goal of this last week was to verify the findings of the first two weeks, to do a final design iteration and test this with the local entrepreneurs. Furthermore we needed to discuss the medical content of the application with a medical expert and find answers on how to train local entrepreneurs.

Interview Dr. Brian

An appointment was arranged with doctor Brian, who is working as a doctor in Health Center 4 in the town Kibaale. We discussed the most common diseases in Uganda, like HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, meningitis and pneumonia. He explained which symptoms are most common and how he recognizes diseases. The first symptoms of malaria are for example joint pain, headache and a fast increasing temperature. While HIV patients mainly suffer from fever during evening hours. It was a fruitful interview and valuable insights are gained on the medical content of our design.

Interview Nicholas

Nicholas is the program coordinator from Emesco. G-Young and Chéron met him in their first week in Uganda and Jozine and Mirte get the chance to meet him too. He is training VHTs (Village Health workers). VHTs are trained to sell drugs in rural areas for children below 5 years. Healthy Entrepreneurs is recruiting VHTs to become local entrepreneurs so they will be able to treat more people and more diseases. Nicholas told us a lot about what the training looks like and he gave us valuable feedback on our design and a possible implementation.

Interview Nicholas at Emesco

Brenda's drugstore

Some local entrepreneurs own a drugstore and their patients visit them in their store. These entrepreneurs have a lot of knowledge about medicines and are very experienced. On Monday we drove to the Kagadi district and on our way we visited two of these drugstores where we got the chance to interview the owners. In the picture below you can see Brenda: an experienced entrepreneur who was happy to answer our questions and test the prototype.

Brenda in her drugstore

Cluster meeting in Kagadi

In Kagadi HE organised a cluster meeting. After the meeting was finished, we could interview them and test the prototype. This prototype is a working application, so we were able to observe the user interaction of the entrepreneurs with our app. Next to this, we managed to get a lot of confirmation on earlier insights. It was a successful day and we were able to ask all the questions we had left.

Entrepreneur Evas is testing the app

A grateful entrepreneur Matia

Uganda is developing

We are glad to notice that the Ugandan government is investing in the development of the country. The VHT training is improved and the entrepreneurs can tell us that a lot is changing regarding health and hygiene. On our way to Kagadi we passed by a building of the Ugandan Rural Development & Training (URDT). The URDT includes primary school and high school for girls and there is also the African Rural University. They teach girls how to built a future and stimulate the development in rural Uganda.

URDT building

Interview Edward

Edward is the warehouse manager of the HE office in Kibaale. This was the first office of the HE and they currently have 160 entrepreneurs. Edward is also training them about business management and record keeping. To end the field research we interviewed him to get our last questions answered and to show our final iteration of the app.

Edward is testing the app

Goodbye Uganda

The only task left for now is to say goodbye to this beautiful green country. The weeks in the field brought us many valuable insights and we are looking forward to use the latest results to make a final design iteration! After the Christmas holidays we will continue our project in the Netherlands and of course we will keep you up to date!