Kangaroo Mother Care, skin-to-skin contact for at least eight hours a day, improves the survival of preterm babies by up to 40 percent and needs no medical equipment, yet it is rarely practised in Uganda. With Design Without Borders, Merlijn and Emile collected data in three hospitals in Kampala, ran focus groups with mothers and sorted every barrier they found into six categories.
One barrier is the ward itself: small rooms furnished with hospital beds donated from the Global North, not designed for this kind of care. The chair supports a mother both sitting and lying down, and fits a ward that is already short of space. It was prototyped with local craftsmen, tested in hospitals and well received by mothers. Design Without Borders is now raising funds for local production.
