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Designing a Blood Donation Digital Ecosystem to Save Lives

Our Challenge: Blood Shortage Crisis

In the last few months, we have been busy engaging in conversations with Spectrum Analytics, a firm interested in leveraging digital technologies to build a digital ecosystem around the problem of blood donation in Botswana. Botswana is currently experiencing an acute shortage of blood across hospitals and blood transfusion centres. Although the Ministry of Health encourages the public to donate blood, few have participated in this noble cause. Imagination Lancaster through its partnership with Stanbic bank (AcceleR8), Spectrum Analytics, Botswana National Blood Transfusion Services, and others plan to develop a blood donation digital ecosystem through a hackathon approach involving the general public. This project explores how digital technologies, i.e. mobile, web, and USSD (for GSM phones widely used in rural areas) might promote and motivate potential donors to better participate in blood donations.

Where our imagination fit

We are excited to be collaborating with Spectrum Analytics and other stakeholders to facilitate a co-creation process of a digital blood donation ecosystem with the public in Botswana. We plan to participate in user requirements elicitation, platform design, development, deployment and go-live. Throughout this project, we will be using virtual co-design workshops via digital tools like MIRO whiteboards to immerse the public for the first time in curating the digital blood donation ecosystem. This project draws from the previous insights on building innovation ecosystems with entrepreneurs in Botswana. We are confident that, through this project, we will gather rich data to refine our approach for understanding and curating ecosystems. This approach will inspire us to further evaluate the framework with other African countries and beyond where similar ecosystem challenges exist. Watch out for more on this exciting project with the potential to make a difference…

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