Helps community health workers spot high-risk pregnancies early and get mothers referred in time
In rural Kenyan counties, many pregnant women see a clinician only once or twice before delivery, and community health workers keep paper registers for 100 or more households each. Danger signs like rising blood pressure or swelling are written down but rarely acted on in time, and pre-eclampsia remains a leading cause of maternal death in the region.
Kinga gives health workers an Android app that works offline and guides each home visit, pairing with Bluetooth blood-pressure cuffs and reading urine test strips from a phone photo. A risk model trained on 60,000 anonymised antenatal records flags women who need a clinic visit within 48 hours, sends the referral by SMS and tracks whether she arrived.
County health departments, faith-based hospital networks and maternal health programmes in East Africa, covering about 7 million pregnancies a year across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.
Annual subscription of US$4,800 per health facility, covering its linked health workers, plus paid set-up and training; programme funders often cover the first two years.
Wanjiru KamauCEO and Co-founder
Otieno OchiengChief Medical Officer and Co-founder
Brian MutuaCTOI followed a health worker for a day of home visits. A reading of 152/101 at week 34 triggered an SMS referral, and by the afternoon the app showed the clinic had confirmed the mother's arrival. The health worker said the blood-pressure trend chart was the first time she could show a mother why the visit mattered.
We connected Kinga's referral feed to our clinic booking product in two counties. The Android app syncs reliably after days without signal, and the urine-strip photo reading was more consistent than I expected. We had to build a custom export because there is no standard API to the national records yet.
The referral completion numbers are encouraging, and the product was clearly designed with health workers. But the risk model has so far only been validated retrospectively on historical records, and health workers still enter visits twice where facilities keep paper registers. In our research, national programmes rarely procure a risk tool before prospective evidence exists, so the planned study is the gating item.
Reply from Wanjiru Kamau, CEO
Our prospective study starts in January with an independent university team, and we will publish the protocol first.
Most health apps at seed report downloads; Kinga reports that 81% of high-risk referrals now arrive within 48 hours, up from 69%. Wanjiru and Dr. Ochieng have spent years inside county health systems and know who pays and when. Funder-paid first years are a risk for long-term revenue, but they have a credible plan to move costs onto county budgets.
Reply from Wanjiru Kamau, CEO
Two counties have now put year-three costs into their own budgets, which is the shift you asked about.
Coming soon. Testimonials are invited by the founder and shown separately from open reviews.
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