Village HopeCore (VHC) is an organization in the Maara region of Kenya. For the past several years, it has focused on setting up mobile clinics at area schools, providing basic health check-ups and malaria prevention services to students and teachers.

In Amplify’s Early Childhood Development Challenge, VHC proposed a new type of mobile clinic—one aimed explicitly at the health needs of children under five years old and their parents. By remaking its mobile clinics as child development and maternal health centers, VHC angled to offer a new interconnected constellation of services including:

• Information sessions and breakout groups for parents covering breast feeding, early childhood nutrition, family planning, child spacing, oral rehydration therapy, the danger signs of malaria, and hygiene.
• Growth monitoring, malnutrition screenings, and immunization checks for children under five.
• Family planning, HIV testing, and prenatal counseling for mothers or expecting mothers.
• Structured play for children to encourage cognitive development.

Village HopeCore used its time at Amplify’s human-centered design bootcamp to create prototypes to test their communications and outreach, as well as to understand what services would be most valuable to mothers. ​“The human-centered design phase has taught our team a lot of program development,” says Anne Gildea, who is leading the project. ​“We learned that often times even well-informed assumptions are incorrect.” In the initial months of prototyping, VHC conducted 21 mobile clinics across Maara Sub-County, reaching over 500 mothers and fathers and providing direct health services to 300 people. They are continuing to learn and iterate, now piloting the program throughout 2016.