Along the rolling hills of northern Ghana, a vehicle zoomed by in the darkness on a dirt road one recent evening. Sirens wailed, announcing to passersby that there was an emergency. It sounded like an ambulance — but it was something different entirely.
The vehicle had three wheels instead of four. It was small and nimble, yet beefed up to handle rocky roads and narrow lanes, all while carrying patients, nurses and essential medical equipment.
The motorized tricycle was designed by Moving Health, a startup aiming to transform maternal health care in rural Ghana, where it can often take pregnant women hours to get to the nearest hospital.
“The roads are very bad in these areas that we work,” said Moving Health co-founder and CEO Emily Young.
Access to ambulances is severely limited, and it can be extremely difficult for larger emergency vehicles to navigate rural areas, Young added. For pregnant women experiencing a medical emergency, hiring a local motorcycle driver is generally the safest bet for getting to the hospital. But that journey can be treacherous.
“An example of the challenges that someone might face in this area can be illustrated by a story of a woman who I met in Nabilo, Ghana,” Young said. “She realized that she had a pregnancy complication and she needed to go to the hospital. And there were no options besides calling a local motorcycle driver.”
The woman’s husband couldn’t go with her, so she had to hop onto the back of the bike by herself, while beginning to go into labor. To make matters worse, it was the rainy season, when roadways get particularly slippery. The motorcycle driver lost control, and they crashed.
“When she walked into the maternity ward, she was covered in mud and blood.” Young said.
The woman and her baby survived, but it was a traumatizing experience. “I think the crazy thing about that story is that she counts as a successful birth statistic because neither of them died.”
The maternal mortality rate in Ghana is more than four times the international target, in part due to transportation issues in rural communities. While developing Moving Health, Young and her colleagues spoke with local nurses, midwives and doctors on the ground in Ghana. They discovered that what rural communities needed most wasn’t more ambulances. They needed transportation that could actually handle rough terrain, while still being cost-effective and easy to scale at a local level.
“There’s certainly an element of, ‘if something works in the West, let’s just plug it in everywhere,’” Young said. “And I think that, with traditional ambulances, there’s not as much thought that maybe that’s not the right solution for these really rural areas.”
Young first developed the idea for Moving Health 10 years ago at MIT D-lab, where researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology work with student engineers on practical solutions to global poverty challenges. Rather than coming up with complex new technologies, the products developed at D-lab often use existing devices and materials that can be scavenged.
“The first prototype that we made, I learned how to weld,” Young said. “We had built this trailer that could be pulled behind the back of a motorcycle. But I remember in the final presentation of the class, we sat on it, and it broke.”
A decade later, the project has come a long way from the classroom. Moving Health now has fleets of ambulance tricycles produced at a tenth of the cost of traditional ambulances. They’re manufactured locally in Ghana and are the product of thorough research and conversations with people living in the rural communities they’re meant to serve.
The nonprofit partnered with locals, like Isaac Amoah Quansah, who first joined the project because his own wife had experienced difficulty getting to the hospital during a pregnancy emergency.
Quansah, now the nonprofit’s CTO, said Moving Health serves more than 100,000 people across rural Ghana, and their tricycle ambulances have been able to cut the average time it takes to get to the hospital in half.
“Sometimes, you can see the joy a mother expresses or a family expresses because Moving Health was in this community to carry their relatives to the hospital,” Quansah said. “They always appreciate what we do.”
Still, the road ahead isn’t smooth. There are funding constraints, and tariffs could drive up prices for the necessary materials.
But Quansah said the team is in it for the long haul and hopes to expand in Ghana and around the continent, because in rural communities, access to emergency transportation isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity.
