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.