Khushi Baby: FIELD NOTES #1
This post comes to SDev 24/7 from collaborators at Khushi Baby, a social enterprise dedicated to tracking immunizations to the last mile so that 1.5 million children globally do not continue to die from vaccine-preventable diseases each year. The Khushi Baby system integrates a mobile app, wearable NFC technology and a cloud database to produce a complete platform to bridge the world's vaccination gap.
I’ve spent the past year learning about Khushi Baby’s development from conception to birth and am now proud be playing a key role in its infancy, the most critical and malleable stage in a child’s life. During this phase, the Khushi Baby team has been taking in novel experiences and mass amounts of information, synthesizing rapidly, and learning and adapting as we go. The day before I left the US for Udaipur, my parents and I had a conversation about various words in Hindi (mostly, this was in the context of the fact that I only know about a handful of Hindi words and that maybe I should have watched more Bollywood movies as a child after all so that I wouldn’t currently have this problem). The Hindi word for “vaccination”, tikka karan, came up and my parents pointed out that the word tikka also refers to the red mark, a form of protection against evil forces, worn on the forehead as per Hindu tradition. I found this quite apt, seeing as how a vaccination is not only a biological form of protection against disease, but also a powerful symbol of good health; with the Khushi Baby necklace, we hope that immunization can be promoted and marketed to the community as a healthy practice for preventing illness. We aim not to transform the way villagers in rural Rajasthan live their lives, but to conform to the local context in a way that confers a strong health benefit while sticking to the cultural values so deeply ingrained in their society.
Upon reaching India, I was eager to get to the field and see the KB system in action. The following day, Logan, Alam, Sanjana and I headed to Girwa to oversee one of Seva Mandir’s tikka karan camps in the village of Jabla Nala. This proved to be quite an introduction to the field; as we got closer to the Pattiya zone of Girwa, it became clear that we really had no idea where this camp was being held. I would soon come to realize that this was often the case, as cell phone signal in these regions is limited, Traditional Birth Attendants (TBAs) in the village are difficult to locate, and households are sometimes spread several kilometers apart; in these situations, the only way to get around is by word of mouth. Little did we know, “just around the corner” did not refer to the camp being on the opposite side of a small dirt path, but rather on the opposite end of a mountain range. Since we were completely unaware that we were about to embark on a rigorous 6-mile hike, the four of us came completely unprepared: we wore the wrong shoes, we brought one small water bottle to share amongst us all, and one banana each to serve as our lunch. Kishan, a young schoolboy, graciously showed us the way – keep in mind, Kishan deftly climbs up these rocky hillsides to get to school every single day and, quite frankly, we were probably slowing him down. Despite our strenuous journey, I consider that day to be one of my most enjoyable experiences in the field so far. It literally seemed at times that we were in the middle of nowhere with no other humans in sight, surrounded only by the blue above us and the green and brown below.
Upon reaching the camp, we found that the Seva Mandir GNMs had already arrived, with their syringes in hand and their motorcycles parked on the side of the hut (if only we had access to some of those!) It is one thing to see how the Khushi Baby mobile app and necklace function at home and to see pictures of it being used in the field, but physically being in the last mile and seeing our system hold its own in such conditions was something entirely different.
Every day, I am impressed by the people that I work with and am thankful to be exposed to their creative ideas and unique perspectives. Since those first few days in the field it has been an uphill battle, sorting through a logistical nightmare to get our trial off the ground. But now, as a team, we are prepared for whatever may come our way. Khushi Baby has taken its first hesitant, teetering steps and is now ready to hit the ground running.
This was written originally for Khushi Baby's blog and has been reposted here with permission of Khushi Baby and the author.
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Preethi was raised in southern California and joined the Khushi Baby team in August 2014, having graduated from UC Berkeley. In college, Preethi developed a passion for understanding and alleviating health disparities in India. She has continued to pursue this passion at Khushi Baby, where her roles involve Operations Management and Research Logistics. Currently, Preethi is studying Microbial Disease Epidemiology and Global Health at the Yale School of Public Health and plans to pursue a career in medicine.
