What happened in Nairobi last week?

Last week I had the privilege to travel to Nairobi to attend the 2024 Campaign Digitization conference hosted by the Alliance for Malaria Prevention and IFRC. It was a super short trip, but I was really glad I was able to join and I got to make a ton of great connections. As shown by the sweet chart below, the ratio of travel time to conference time was a bit ridiculous but I think it was worth it.

There were more than 150 people in attendance including Malaria program leaders from Ministries of Health across most of Africa. A major component of the conference involved product demonstrations from digital health companies with solutions aiming to make health campaigns more effective and efficient.

I’m proud that Crosscut was one of ten digital health organizations selected to demo our solution for improving health campaign effectiveness to conference attendees. We were the smallest company there (by an order of magnitude probably), and we were proud to stand among so many distinguished digital health organizations working hard to make the world a better place. I took advantage of the chance to ask lots of questions and learn from some of the great leaders of these organizations on how we can better serve our users. I also asked some questions on how best to stay alive financially in this complex environment. 😊

The demo went great and we received a ton of positive feedback from attendees. I was really happy with how the demo went: we heard that our app was concrete, clear, and well-suited to planning health campaigns, which is very much what we are after. After the demo, several Ministry of Health representatives asked us to add additional countries to our application, which was really validating for our work. I’m trying to follow up this week with some of the people I met who may be interested in helping us to make our app available in 60 countries this year.  

The presentations given by conference panelists were interesting as well. There were several great presentations, but I wanted to flag a few: PMI representative Chris Warren shared about the progress and challenges with implementing TraceNet, a bold effort led by PMI and The Global Fund to spread the use of GS1 product identification standards to better track and manage insecticide-treated nets. We also heard from WHO GIS Centre representative Sam Omara on his experience implementing geo-enabled microplanning for immunization in Bangladesh. This session was particularly interesting to me, as geo-enabled microplanning represents a great potential use case for the Crosscut app. I'm hoping to follow up with the GIS Centre in the coming weeks.

Whether you were able to join the conference or not, we'd love to connect with you to hear where you see the opportunities for increasing the use of geospatial analytics to improve health campaign planning.

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