That time Banda Health got into the motorcycle repair business (sort of)

August 30, 2021June 5, 2020 by Thomas Letchford

That time Banda Health got into the motorcycle repair business (sort of)

Hello everyone!

Before we get to our main story – a short fun one about a time Banda Health got into the motorcycle repair business – I just want to check in and say thank you.

Over the last few months, wherever we are around the world, we have all experienced some level of loss, isolation, uncertainty and frustration due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But during that same time, you have actually increased your donations to Banda Health. This is amazing.

I want to thank each of you for doing this with us. Four years ago when Wes and I founded Banda Health, we dreamed of empowering frontline healthcare workers in some of the world’s lowest-income communities. Your generosity for people around the world, at a time when your own lives and communities have been upended, encourages us and inspires us to do better and to be better.

Thanks!

Steve, for the Banda Health team

Photo by Sophie Diarra

This is a story about what a boda boda, or 125cc’s of Indian-made motorcycle, can do for healthcare for patients who really need it. But we will get to that in a minute.

Nampunge Clinic is the largest of five clinics run by the Church of God Uganda and its partners. Before Banda Health, like many clinics across Uganda and across sub-Saharan Africa, Nampunge struggled to maintain its medicine and supplies inventory. Routinely running out of medicine meant two things: 1) Nampunge routinely failed to provide care to patients who really needed it, and 2) the clinic lost a lot of income, which really hurt its chance to ever be financially sustainable.

When Nampunge first started using Banda Health to manage its money and its inventory, it was losing something like $600 every month (Church of God Uganda and its partners covered the shortfall, which was about half of Nampunge’s budget). Banda Health helped them track all their income, each of their expenses, and not only know exactly what was on their medicine shelf at any given time, but also begin to see how much of each medicine they prescribed each week. By the end of month 2 they broke even, and by the end of months 3 and 4 they were averaging an $800 surplus.

Which brings us, finally, to the boda boda. In the pre-Banda Health era, Nampunge sent someone into town to purchase medicines two or three times a week, usually after a medicine had run out and a patient had gone away empty handed. Between paying a boda boda driver, paying for the employee’s time, and losing a patient’s business in the first place, Nampunge was paying much more for its inventory than it should have been.

What’s more, Nampunge actually owned a boda boda. But it had broken down and had been sitting in a shed for months. Banda Health let the clinic see exactly where its money was going, and what medicines they needed to buy not just for the week, but for the entire month. With a clear picture of their finances, Nampunge could now set aside a bit of money each week until they had enough to fix the motorcycle, cutting inventory costs even further.

Reliable, cheap transport – not to mention fun to zip around on. And with help from Banda Health to make tracking income and expenses and inventory easy and effective, Nampunge’s very own motorcycle is faithfully delivering medicine, and savings, to the clinic and its patients.

Onwards!

Your donations take Banda Health to clinics like Nampunge who struggle to balance the business of healthcare (how to sustain it) with caring for patients day in and day out, even when they cannot pay. With Banda Health, clinics provide dependable healthcare to needy patients for the long-term. Thank you so much for doing this with us!

Unlikely Friends in Africa’s Biggest Slum

February 6, 2020 by Thomas Letchford

Unlikely Friends in Africa’s Biggest Slum

By Natalie Walters

There’s something amazing about watching people who society assumes should be enemies work together as friends and allies instead.

Here in Kibera, often said to be the largest slum in Africa, the unlikely friends are the Christians that run the mission clinic Chemi Chemi ya Uzima and the Muslims who make up the elder council that runs the neighborhood.

“The Muslims accept us and are willing to help whenever we call on them,” said Mellen, who came to Chemi Chemi after attending Nairobi Baptist Church, which runs the clinic.

The most obvious example of this growing relationship between the two groups came after a contentious national election in 2017. With this part of Kibera being majority Muslim, Chemi Chemi workers feared for their safety and closed for a week. But at the time, a group of Muslims came by to offer a few words.

“You’re ok,” they told the Chemi Chemi group. “You are our own. Nothing will happen to you. We will protect you.”

At one point during the election upheaval, Mellen remembers being personally protected when she was in trouble.

“Oh we know her, and she’s our doctor,” they said when another group was suspicious of her.

Mellen believes the clinic’s strong reputation and credibility are why they’ve been accepted in Kibera. She says the employees at Chemi Chemi have a heart to serve and have never mistreated a patient.

As an outreach clinic, Chemi Chemi can’t offer competitive salaries so its employees are there because they want to help the population of Kibera. In fact, right now they sell drugs at cost, so they don’t make money off of them. And like many other clinics we’ve introduced you to, many of their patients can’t pay.

Chemi Chemi is one of the incredible clinic teams that Banda Health gets to work with, clinics serving some very-low-income communities across Kenya. Banda uses IT solutions to help them maximize the limited resources they have so that they can focus on what they’re good at, reaching out to and caring for patients.

Unlikely?

Unlikely friends. An unlikely place to want to work as a nurse. Does access to healthcare for the poor in places like Kibera sound unlikely? Sure. At Banda Health, we see better than most just how unlikely our dream might be. But we also we also see firsthand the power of designing big ideas one step at a time, tailoring solutions precisely to problems piece by piece. We’ve already seen Banda save these clinics time and money, and we’re working hard to do more for them and to expand to new clinics.

Unlikely things happen every single day. Are you with us?

Natalie Walters

A journalist from New York, Natalie is helping write stories about the clinics using Banda Go.

Change-makers Mary and Joseph leave comfortable lives, move to slum, open clinic, school, orphanage

February 5, 2020January 23, 2020 by Thomas Letchford

Change-makers Mary and Joseph leave comfortable lives, move to slum, open clinic, school, orphanage

By Steve Letchford

It’s really exciting to work with change-makers.

Last week, I had the pleasure of hosting three members of the team from Cana Family Health Care Center – one of our clients – at our home in Kijabe. Cana has been switching over to Banda from paper. They are a surprisingly large operation, so it’s taking some time, but once they are up and running completely on Banda, they will be able to streamline their operation and drastically increase their impact on the community they serve. I wanted to share a bit with you about last week’s visit because for me, it was such a good reminder of the incredible opportunity we have at Banda to partner with devoted and passionate change-makers, and to equip them to go further and faster than they would have ever expected.

Joseph and Mary (4th and 5th from the left), who founded Cana and several other community initiatives, wanted an introduction to Kijabe Hospital’s Director of Nursing Education, to advocate for a young high schooler in their care looking to become a nurse. Harrison (3rd from the left), who you may remember from our newsletter a few months ago, is the administrator at Cana. He came to continue developing a working relationship with Kijabe Hospital to act as a referral hospital for the clinic, especially for patients with limited means. The last two on the right are Molly and Edward who work at Kijabe Hospital (more on them below).

Change-making usually isn’t glorious and celebrated – often it’s just normal people doing the right thing.

Back in the ‘90s, Mary Mambo bumped into some boys who were begging on the street. When she heard they only lived 15 minutes away, in a large Nairobi slum called Mukuru, she said “Take me there.” And they did. It was a very different neighborhood from her own. The boys showed Mary their homes. Every house Mary visited had a parent in bed, HIV-positive, dying. During their visit last week, Mary’s husband Joseph described Mukuru to me as “the place where you only go to when life is hard. And then when you leave, you have to forget it because it is too painful.”

At the time Mary, a nurse, had a few private clinics doing well financially. Joseph, an auditor, had a well-paying job in the civil service. Faced with suffering like that, it is easy to look away, go home and carry on with life. Mary and Joseph chose otherwise – they moved to Mukuru and opened a clinic.

They sold their house – “our kids’ inheritance” – slapped together four walls of corrugated iron sheeting for the clinic, and then ran headfirst into the harsh realities that the people there were living with. They called the clinic Cana, because “That is where Jesus did his first miracle, and these people needed a miracle.” As they increasingly experienced and understood their new neighbors needs, Mary and Joseph continued to respond. They saw too many kids on the streets instead of in school – so they opened a school. They saw that many of their school girls were being sexually abused at home – so they opened a rescue center/orphanage. Too many mothers and babies lost in home births – they opened a maternity ward. Too many people walking through life without hope – they opened a church.

Today, the school teaches several hundred kids grades 1 through 8, the orphanage cares for dozens of girls, the clinic sees 1800 patients and delivers 120 babies per month, and they are opening an operating room on the second floor above the church.

But last week, with all that going on in the background, Mary and Joseph were in Kijabe for the sake of just one young girl. A few years back they met a woman struggling to provide for her twelve orphaned grandchildren. To make a long story short, they had provided her with a place to stay, helped her find a way to make some money, and had taken four of her grandchildren to live with them at the orphanage. Now the second eldest was having a difficult time getting into a nursing program, and Mary and Joseph had come to advocate for their granddaughter, who wasn’t their granddaughter.

Change-maker + change-maker = exciting progress.

From the beginning of Banda’s relationship with Cana Family Health Center, Cana’s young administrator Harrison has really pushed to build a relationship with Kijabe Hospital to make sure that Cana has a hospital to refer their patients to, especially when their patients do not have money to pay. “Our community thinks that we can handle everything, but we cannot. We can only do what we can do.” Harrison already tested this vision with a young mother whose baby experiencing problems with his eyes – through Banda, he was able to arrange for her to travel to Kijabe for treatment.

Last week, Harrison was able to connect with Molly and Edward – the people at Kijabe Hospital who find creative ways to finance procedures and treatments for patients without the ability to pay. They write up patient stories for an organization called Watsi that crowdfunds select surgical cases (most of that money comes from the U.S.), and they work with foundations and churches abroad to supplement Kijabe Hospital’s several funds for patients in need.

It’s really exciting when Banda is able to go beyond IT solutions and act as a connector. The budding Cana – Kijabe Hospital relationship is an early example of the types of collaboration that the Banda network can facilitate. We often say that Banda Health is our baby and that it’s taking a global village to raise it – in the same way, change-makers like Mary, Joseph, Harrison, their team at Cana, and healthcare practices all over can accomplish so much more together than alone. We’ve got some ideas about how Banda can facilitate both collaboration, funding, and supply chain efforts to make healthcare more effective and more affordable at the same time.

Be a change-maker.

Banda Go is our baby, and it’s taking a global village to raise it. If you want to partner with local change-makers like Mary, Joseph and Harrison to transform healthcare in low-income communities like Mukuru slum, you can donate to Banda Health. This year we will be pushing hard to expand Banda to reach hundreds of clincs all over Kenya, and beyond. Every $10 helps us reach 150 more patients over the next five years.

Thank you for doing this with us!

Steve Letchford

Steve Letchford is the President of Banda Health. He lives in Kijabe, Kenya with his wife Sherri.

Friends who gave up and changed their world

December 8, 2021December 22, 2019 by Thomas Letchford

Friends who gave up and changed their world

By Steve Letchford

I am old enough to know now that, behind all the sweet stories and pageants of this holiday season, there is a Christmas story reality that gets some people to give up their plans for finding peace and security in life and pursue something bigger but less comfortable. Many religious people know this Christmas story of the All-Powerful giving up privilege, taking on the form of a Servant and an Outcast, and then asking people to do the same and follow Him. Many know it, but only some seem to be deeply affected by it.

I want to tell you the story of two friends of ours who are a part of that “some” who heard the story and were deeply affected by its reality, friends who gave up on their personal plans for peace and security and, as a result, changed their world. Their names are Steve and Mary Njenga and, when I am weary, it is friends like these who cheer me on without ever saying a word. Banda Health went live in their clinic in a very low-income community this past week so I have been thinking about them a bit extra lately. Steve and Mary are the types of friends that you just have to watch them live life and you get strength for another day.

Seventeen years ago, Mary and Steve were young, gifted, upwardly-mobile Kenyan professionals when their world began to change. Mary was already the Nursing Director of Kijabe Hospital’s operating rooms (then and now one of the busiest operating rooms in East Africa), and Steve was a successful speaker. Their family’s economic future looked bright, to say the least. But early one morning in 2002, while he was leading one of Kijabe Hospital’s outreaches in a town a few hours north of us, Steve looked up at the top of a nearby volcano and asked, “What’s up there?”

“Not much, just a small, really poor village,” was the reply.

That village was Eburru, and it was remote, dusty and dry. Dry, they were told, as in “even-the-cabbage-doesn’t-grow-there-dry.”

For many reasons, including the fact that there is little very little cabbage growing there, it is not the type of place that upwardly mobile young Kenyans move to in the prime of their working lives.

But one year later, Steve led a hospital outreach trip to that mountain-top village, he and his team sleeping on the floors of an empty local building. The poverty and medical needs were far worse than they had imagined. They quickly realized that the 4-day outreach hadn’t made much of a dent in the need. So a few months later, Steve and Mary began traveling back every weekend to help out more, leaving Kijabe every Friday night after work and coming back early every Monday morning.

After a couple of years, they could no longer ignore the fact that even going every weekend was not enough. So they did the unthinkable. They moved with their two boys to this apparently God-forsaken village in the middle of nowhere.

When I took our team to first visit Steve and Mary three years ago, I caught Banda’s young Kenyan software developers staring in wide-eyed disbelief as they listened to these healthcare heroes share their story how they ended up moving with their kids to this dusty little village. “Exactly why did you move your family up here?” the Banda guys asked incredulously.

This year, the US Ambassador attended an opening ceremony for the local high school. I heard him ask Steve and Mary that same question, “Why did you move here?” No family ties, no prospect of financial security.

Their answer was very enlightening. To paraphrase it, the reality of Christmas caused them to give up their own plans for personal security and trade them out for plans that prioritized loving God and others

Though they had never planned to move to a place like Eburru, when they saw the crushing need there after 10 years of climbing the ladder early in their professional career, it became clear that this was what they were to do. So they moved. To Eburru of all places.

Christmas messed up what they thought their dreams and plans for life were. But it was “good messy,” like windswept hair, open-air markets, and family reunions.

At my age, you realize that life affected by Love usually is this kind of good messy. It takes you through the places in life where the cabbage won’t grow, the places described by only the politest people of people as “messy.” Moving to Eburru, life for Steve and Mary’s family got messy quickly, raising two boys with overwhelming need and poverty all around them. But in that mess, a transformation in this little village area on the side of a volcano began to happen.

Malnutrition in the area was so bad when they started visiting that they got friends to help them buy fifteen female goats and one male goat. Working with the four small churches they helped get started there, they gave one goat each to fifteen different families in the community and said, “You have to give the first female goat born back to the church so that they can give it to the next family in the community, but you can keep all the rest after that.” Though the poverty persisted, many families got the opportunity to raise goats and malnutrition plummeted.

The healthcare needs were equally overwhelming, so they took a first baby step and opened a basic clinic in a mud-brick, thatched-roof rondavel. “We delivered babies and sutured wounds in there with no electricity. But if you needed your tooth pulled, we laid you down on the grass over there,” Mary says now, still with a twinkle in her eye. Today, they run a 4-room cinderblock clinic complete with maternity services. This is the little clinic that our team helped get the Banda clinic management solution up and running in this past week, helping them maximize the use of every shilling they spend providing good healthcare in this very poor community.

But Mary and Steve didn’t stop there. The educational situation was desperate so they started a school first for orphans and other local kids, then expanded the school to take in paying boarding students and make it sustainable. They recruited young Kenyan teachers with huge hearts, not just teaching academics but helping shape character. Ten years later, the school has over 500 students from the local area and beyond. The national grade 8 exam scores of this “little” school up on the top of the volcano are in the top 5% in the country, and their new high school expands to grade 11 this year and grade 12 next year. When we went to visit them in October, the US Ambassador was there to see what had come to pass.

The reality of Christmas messed up Steve and Mary’s plans for peace and security. We watched it happen first-hand many years ago. But they are as full of life today as anyone we know. Watching them is good for our souls, and gives us the strength to press on in the “good mess” of our own journey through life.

The Banda team’s lives are much richer because we get to work with the Steves and Marys of the world. We love getting to be a small part of what they do for others and to share their stories with you. Thanks for being a part of this journey with us.

Banda Health 2020

A few people have asked me recently what the Banda project needs for its next steps. Over the next few years, we’re investing heavily in transforming healthcare in very-low-income communities, empowering health teams like Mary and Steve’s with technology. Right now we are working hard to raise the next $700,000. With these funds, Banda Health will add powerful new features and expand its coverage to hundreds of new clinics.

Every dollar helps our team. So many have helped us over the past few years. When we remember that we are not alone on our journey, we feel like celebrating – like putting our arms around whoever is closest and grab that selfie with irrepressible grins that we can’t wipe off our faces!

Banda Health is our baby, and it’s taking a global village to raise it. We are so thankful for each of you for being a part of this village with us!

Read about the Healthcare Heroes Campaign

Wishing you a wonderful Advent season
and New Year!

Steve and Sherri, for the Banda Health team and our families

Love Does What It Takes

July 7, 2023November 20, 2019 by Thomas Letchford

Love Does What It Takes

By Steve Letchford

A nurse, with a half-dead woman strapped to her back with a bedsheet, riding a motorcycle through the woods in the pitch-black night …

The picture of that nurse, Irene Mundia, showing up at our hospital that night is forever embedded in my mind. When people ask me who my healthcare hero is, I don’t blink. It’s Irene. Irene showed me that night what the love of God is like when nothing is easy.

Irene was a nurse friend of ours during the years that Sherri and I were working, and raising our kids, in rural Zambia, central Africa. Irene gave up the chance to make a lot of money by working in the big city and spent the last 20 years of her career running a small clinic in a very poor and remote village called Mushima. Our family lived at a hospital that felt like it was right on the edge of the world, but it wasn’t. Mushima was on the edge, 30 miles past us down dirt tracks. In Mushima there was no running water, no indoor toilets, and no electricity. Well, almost no electricity except Irene’s small solar panel that powered a tiny fridge and single light bulb in her little clinic.

Irene and her assistant, Salome, did the work of a doctor, nurse, administrator, treasurer, and maintenance man all by themselves. Why? Because there was no one else. Malaria, malnutrition, leaking roofs, government reports, guys who chopped off their finger with an ax, pregnant women – you name it, they took care of it all.

Early one evening, a young woman in labor arrived at Irene’s little clinic, about to have her first baby. But as the evening ended and the dark African night consumed everything, it was clear something wasn’t right with this lady and her unborn baby. Irene, working by the light of that single light bulb, realized that disaster was looming. Not only was the unborn baby coming out backward, but the mother’s pain was getting worse and her baby had stopped moving. It was clear that the baby was going to die, and so was this young mother.

Irene knew she was in trouble. Cars never came to Mushima in the middle of the night. Cars didn’t really come to Mushima during the day. So, in the middle of the night, Irene and Salome stopped and prayed. Then Irene told the mother “I’m going into town on my motorbike and see if I can get help.” But the young woman, exhausted and in pain, cried out, “Don’t leave me, or I’ll die.”

Irene knew that the lady was right, so she moved to plan B. She strapped the dying lady onto her back with a bedsheet and set out in the pitch-black on her small motorcycle. Thirty slow miles on a dirt track for Irene and the woman on their motorcycle “ambulance.” By the time they reached the hospital two hours later, Irene was ready to collapse and the mother was unconscious.

It wasn’t every night that women in obstructed labor showed up at our hospital – unconscious, on the back of a motorcycle, strapped to some nurse’s back. Nevertheless, it didn’t take long for our Operating Room team to get the IV’s in and the surgery done. The young mother’s womb had torn open internally and her baby had died but Irene had gotten the mother there in the nick of time, and the young mother had miraculously escaped with her life.

That night, Irene, despairing and totally exhausted, made an indelible mark on my life, teaching me a lesson about what the love of God is like.

That night, Irene showed me that God’s love can be inconvenient, taxing, exhausting or worse, that it can sometimes feel more like Good Friday than Easter. Irene seemed to understand God’s love for herself personally, and that understanding changed the way she loved those around her. That night, God’s love for Irene changed her motorbike into an ambulance. It changed her quiet night at home into a wild ride through the bush. It changed Irene’s rest into exhaustion, and her “excuses” into her “whatever it takes.” In doing so, God’s love changed another woman’s despair into hope.

Irene taught me everything though she said nothing. Her example gave me strength for the dark nights of life that are as inevitable as are the bright sunny mornings. Her example showed me that some days, love would take me by the hand and walk me through the forsaken places in my loved ones’ and neighbors’ hearts. It would take me into those places during the times that their frames were too weak to cry out, “Don’t leave me, or I’ll die”. Irene showed me that love would lead me to do-what-it-takes because love is from God. Twenty years later, I now realize that, in doing so, love would change not only others’ lives but mine too.

Irene Mundia is my healthcare hero. You can see why. That dark night on the motorcycle, she gave me a glimpse of what love is, and of who the healthcare heroes in the forgotten corners of the world are. Today I work for a team called Banda Health, a team that lives the dream of using technology to empower healthcare heroes like Irene so they can transform healthcare in some of the lowest-income communities of the world.

That young woman on Irene’s back could have been my daughter. I get that. Thank you, Irene.

"Healthcare Heroes"

Our Giving Tuesday/Year-End Campaign Is Live!

Our 2019 Giving Tuesday campaign is all about healthcare heroes like Irene.

Every $10 we raise impacts 150 additional patients over the next 5 years alone in clinics like Irene’s. We’re working to transform healthcare for 1+ million patients by 2024.

How can you get involved?

You can donate – every dollar makes a difference for men and women who have nowhere else to turn for good healthcare.
You can help us get the word out:
1. Share our GoFundMe Charity campaign link with your friends and family via email or social media. Here’s the link: https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/healthcareheroes
2. Take it to the next level and start your own fundraising team on GoFundMe Charity – it’s pretty simple to sign up, customize your message and start sharing with people you know.

Steve Letchford

Steve Letchford is the President of Banda Health. He lives in Kijabe, Kenya with his wife Sherri.

When people trust the untrained neighborhood “doctor”

November 20, 2019November 1, 2019 by Thomas Letchford

When people trust the untrained neighborhood "doctor"

By Natalie Walters

If you’re living in the U.S. in 2019 and notice yourself feeling sick, the first thing you probably do is search Google for your symptoms to try to pre-diagnose yourself before you resort to plan B: seeing an actual doctor. In Kenya in 2019, the first thing sick people do is consult a chemist (like a small pharmacy). Chemists sell you almost any type of medicine without a prescription from a doctor or a clinician.

Chemists are mainly looking to sell drugs because that’s the main way they make money. In Kenya, chemists are like Starbucks in the U.S. in that there seems to be one on every block.

Everyone wants to be a chemist because of the money, but not everyone is trained and licensed to do it. There are currently about 5,800 registered pharmacies in Kenya staffed by a registered pharmacy technician, but many health clinic owners suspect there are nearly as many unregistered pharmacies. The Pharmacy and Poisons Board recently shut down 86 unlicensed chemists in western Kenya, according to the Daily Nation.

However, because there’s a chemist on every block, they become part of a neighborhood and are often trusted above anyone else — even if they have no training and a bad track record. As you can imagine, trained medical professionals in Kenya are often frustrated with this trend.

“There’s a gap in the healthcare system in Kenya,” said St. Jude Clinics owner Boniface. “People tend to go to chemists. And this can become a health hazard because then sick people often don’t get better.”

This gap is what made Boniface want to enter the medical industry in Kenya with his own practice as a clinical officer, similar to a physician’s assistant in the U.S.

So how does a real clinical officer in Kenya convince people to come to him instead of an unlicensed chemist who’s just doing guesswork? Good service, according to Boniface.

It’s not enough to just tell a patient how they can get better, he said. In order to set himself apart from the common chemist, he takes time to explain to each patient what’s wrong with them and why he thinks the treatment he chose is the right one. This helps him build trust and loyalty with his patients, who often bring him additional patients via word-of-mouth marketing.

But explaining his diagnosis and treatment is harder than you would think. That’s because his patients have often already been to a chemist and although the chemist’s treatment didn’t work, they still have a hard time trusting someone other than their neighborhood pharmacy.

“People have a tendency to believe the first person they hear so trying to change that mentality is difficult,” he said.

This also applies to asking friends and family for advice on symptoms and what they recommend. Boniface said by the time he sees a patient, they’ve probably already tried and failed at two or three medications. This is a waste of their money and also means their symptoms may have worsened by the time they make it to St. Jude.

As you can probably guess, another way Boniface has been setting his business apart is by using Banda’s software. When we asked him what he thinks of it so far, he immediately said, “Awesome!”

Prior to Banda, his customers were given patient cards with their appointment information and medical history, but these were often misplaced. Now, he can easily pull up information on a patient from six months ago. This helps him have context on a patient when they come for a return visit and helps him keep track of debts owed to him.

Boniface said another software company had actually approached him prior to Banda but he turned them down because it was too expensive for him. Banda wants its software to be affordable to clinics like St. Jude that see 10-15 patients a day in low-resource areas where people often can’t afford to pay for care. That’s why we’re relying on donations from generous supporters who understand the gap in healthcare in Kenya and want to help.

“I feel bad when I deny people medication so I’m not so strict with payments,” Boniface said. “I give them a plan to pay and follow up with them by using Banda’s tracking system.”

Giving Tuesday Approaching Fast

In our next newsletter (in two weeks time – do you already get them? if not, sign up here) we will be telling you all about our end of year campaign, which will kick off with Giving Tuesday on December 3rd. So look out for that update next time!

But as a sneak peak, consider that for every $1 you donate this year, 3 patients will receive good healthcare from providers like Boniface who go the extra mile in making sure their patients are well taken care of.

Banda Go is our baby, and it’s taking a global village to raise it. Thanks for doing this with us!