Financial Services

Hugo Morales of Munai Health in Brazil will integrate OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 and other Large Language Models (LLMs) with Munai's Clinical Intelligence platform to help frontline healthcare providers adhere to guidelines for antimicrobial therapy and reduce antimicrobial resistance. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria cause over 20% of infections in Brazil. However, the antimicrobial stewardship programs designed to address this consist of complex protocols and there is little training for health workers in low-resource settings.

Fonkoze, Haiti’s largest microfinance institution, provides the rural poor with integrated financial, human development and social protection services. Fonkoze’s Microfinance-based Community Health Worker Program pioneers a sustainable business model to train microfinance clients to incorporate the distribution of life-saving health goods into their businesses, leveraging mobile technology for supply chain management.

Vincent Okungu, Researcher at the University of Nairobi in Kenya, will develop sustainable financing models to boost domestic funding for research and development (R&D) in East Africa. R&D is routinely underfunded in Africa, with the continent producing around 2% of the research output yet accounting for 15% of the global population. Dr. Okungu is a senior health economist whose passion is to see the development of resilient health systems in Africa.

KMET is developing a business plan for CMHI and a strategic plan for ESM-UBT in Kenya. In the next 9-12 months the team specifically intend to understand and then identifying priority market segment, optimize market segments and sales opportunities. develop a robust ESM-UBT supply chain both in the public and private sectors, validate unit economics of ESM-UBT and secure medium and ultimately long term public good and/or other innovative financing vehicles.

Manuela Angelucci from the University of Michigan in the U.S. will test whether addressing financial insecurity and chronic stress in poor Mexican women can improve health. They will perform a randomized control trial involving 15,000 low-income Mexican women who are currently in a national program that provides cash when they receive regular health checks. They hypothesize that automatically transferring 10% of that money into a savings account will simplify the women's finances and thereby reduce stress and improve mental health.

Lauren Hendricks and team at CARE in Uganda will analyze whether motivating women to use mobile financial technology increases their involvement in making household financial decisions, and subsequently improves family health and education. They will develop mobile money subwallets for specific purposes such as school fees and pregnancy so that women can more securely manage their savings. They will also work with influential members of a subset of households to help promote gender equality and develop a consensus towards a household financial action plan.

Kathleen Colson of The BOMA Project, Inc. in Kenya will investigate, measure and document how participation in BOMA's Rural Entrepreneur Access Project (REAP)--a holistic two-year program of sequenced interventions--translates to such gender-influenced outcomes as increased household financial decision-making by women, increased education opportunities for girls and increased food security and use of healthcare by the household.

Rohini Pande of Harvard University in the U.S. will conduct two large-scale randomized controlled trials (RCTs) which will investigate whether female-friendly modifications to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGS) program in India can improve program efficiency and increase rural women's employment, financial inclusion, and empowerment. They will also test the efficacy of transparency tools to document wage payment delays to understanding whether holding local implementers accountable can decrease payment delays to women.

Flora Myamba of Repoa Ltd. in Tanzania will evaluate different methods for motivating women to use mobile financial services by performing a randomized control trial in Tanzania. Access to mobile money platforms in developing countries can help alleviate poverty, but many people, particularly women, do not own a mobile phone, and if they do, it is unclear whether they will use it for financial purposes.