Nigeria Health Watch on Tuesday told the hopeful story of how a Cameroon entrepreneur devised solar-powered incubators to address the grievous shortage of care for premature babies, providing some much-needed relief for a country with high infant mortality rates and an overstressed healthcare system.
According to UNICEF, Cameroon’s under-five mortality rate is 72.2 per 1,000 live births. For newborns, the rate is 48 deaths per 1,000 live births. These numbers have been trending downward since the late 1990s but remain high, both globally and regionally. Sub-Saharan Africa overall has a neonatal mortality rate of 27 per thousand, accounting for 43 percent of all neonatal fatalities around the world.
Cameroon’s dire mortality rates are further concentrated in four remote regions with exceptionally difficult conditions, limited manpower for health care, and a severe shortage of incubators.
An entrepreneur named Serge Armel Njidjou stepped up to address that last problem by creating an incubator that uses locally-sourced materials, includes a smartphone camera so doctors can monitor the children remotely, and employs solar panels to help keep its batteries charged.
These features are vital because Cameroon suffers chronic shortages of electrical power, especially in the hinterlands. Another essential feature is that local sourcing of parts makes them much easier to repair than other incubator systems. Cameroonian doctors frequently complain about the difficulty of repairing broken units due to a shortage of parts and long delays in ordering needed components.
Nigeria Health Watch explained that doctors can use the remote monitoring systems to adjust the temperature in the incubators, monitor the system for malfunctions, and even detect and treat jaundice. Parents can also use the smartphone cameras to see and talk to their babies.
The incubators cost about $4,500 apiece, which is near the low end for equipment that can cost up to $35,000, especially given the remote monitoring capabilities and power systems included in the Cameroonian model.
The incubators most commonly used in Cameroon until now cost almost $10,000 each and are of limited use in areas without reliable electric power. Njidjou’s University Agency for Innovation (AUI) concedes the biggest drawback to its current design is its reliance on solar power to charge the batteries, since parts of Cameroon are noted for heavy seasonal rainfall, but company engineers said they are working on other charging methods.
Njidjou said he was motivated to create his incubators after a woman lost all four of her quadruplets in 2016 due to a shortage of equipment, even at hospitals in Cameroon’s capital of Yaounde. The equipment was tested and approved by Cameroonian health officials in 2019 and awarded government funding in 2021. The incubators also gained international funding after winning prestigious awards for innovation.
Njidjou credited these awards and government funding with boosting acceptance of his products.
“Often many people are skeptical of locally made equipment and do not even want to try it out,” he explained.
Njidjou’s AUI has produced 35 of its incubators so far, providing enormous assistance to under-equipped regional hospitals.
“Babies of 28 to 30 weeks are a risky group. It is risky to transport a low-weight baby from one area to another, they may get infected and eventually die. The biggest difficulty was to have access to conventional incubators, which are very expensive and when faulty, technicians and spare parts are not available, because they are fabricated abroad,” neonatal unit director Ikouba Marthe of the African Genesic Health Center in Yaounde explained to Nigeria Health Watch.
Ikouba said her hospital has two of the AUI incubators, which she credited with saving 45 babies over the past year. Other doctors hailed the robust power system of the incubators, which keeps them running and prevents damage during frequent blackouts.
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