Our Vision
Connecting people to the medical care they need, when they need it most.
At the intersection of transportation and maternal healthcare, we found a massive gap in emergency care and locally made solutions. Geographically neglected areas often find themselves without any realistic, sustainable form of emergency transportation. Our mission is to fill this gap, by making sure every family is confident that they will be connected to healthcare when they need it most.
OUR STORY
At the heart of Moving Health is our commitment to providing maternal health solutions designed by and for last-mile communities. Using a human-centered design approach, we actively engage local stakeholders—including traditional birth attendants, health directorates, and pregnant women—to co-create solutions to maternal healthcare challenges. Our innovative tricycle ambulances are the result of hundreds of conversations, all highlighting the critical need for better transport for women in labor.
Moving Health began as The Okoa Project, a student initiative at MIT D-Lab, where students developed solutions to enhance lives in global communities. In 2016, an all-female team discovered that expecting mothers in Tanzania struggled to find transportation to healthcare centers, leading them to design a trailer attachable to motorcycles. In 2017, the team traveled to Tanzania to collaborate with community members to manufacture these ambulance trailers. By 2019, we partnered with the Virtue Foundation to produce motorcycle ambulances for Ghanaian communities, providing lifesaving transportation for pregnant mothers, sick, and injured individuals.
Transportation is one of the top barriers to receiving medical care globally, especially in rural areas of lower-middle-income countries like Ghana, where delays contribute significantly to high maternal and infant mortality rates. Our focus is on addressing these transportation delays by designing, manufacturing, and distributing safe, affordable medical transportation. Our approach improves on previous attempts by leveraging local systems and community partnerships, ultimately creating jobs and delivering trusted transportation solutions to those in need. At Moving Health, we are dedicated to ensuring that pregnant women have reliable transportation to hospitals, addressing one of the most significant barriers to maternal health in last-mile communities.
OUR IMPACT
Over the past 3 years, we have been able to showcase dramatic healthcare improvements with the introduction of our ambulance. Moving Health has launched 15 ambulances in 2 districts in Ghana, providing emergency transportation coverage to approximately 100,000 people. We have been able to prove the impact of our work on maternal health and emergency health by reducing referral time to the hospital by 50%. 54% of our rides are maternal health cases, increasing a sense of trust in the health system for pregnant mothers, and saving many lives in births too complicated to deliver at home.
Dr. Alex Bapula, the Sissala East Health Director during the time of our pilot, said “This ambulance is a game-changer in our municipality. Since I arrived to work as a Director of Health, our major challenge has been how to get a means of transport for our patients who need medical services to the hospitals and health centers. Getting this tricycle, it’s going to change the whole thing. It will be available in the community and any mother in labor or who needs any emergency services can quickly be transported to a nearby referral facility"
OUR AMBULANCES
In Ghana, where motorcycle taxis are rare, we partnered with local health centers to understand how we can work together with the community to find a solution.
Our Ambulance is a three-wheel vehicle designed to provide a community with safe, reliable emergency transportation. The most important aspect of our ambulance is to tailor it to the needs of our community members. By listening and understanding what our community needs, we included an extra seat inside the ambulance to reduce patients’ fear while on their way to the hospital.
The sustainability of our ambulances is dependent on the existing systems that keep costs down and allows us to create jobs for engineers, dispatchers, nurses, and drivers.
