HelpMum awarded 250,000 Dollars grant from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation

HelpMum awarded 250,000 Dollars grant from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation

Nigeria’s maternal and infant mortality social health-tech enterprise, HelpMum has been awarded a $250,000 grant by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation to support its deployment of an AI-Driven Vaccine Intervention Optimiser – ADVISER, in Nigeria.

ADVISER is an AI framework designed to optimise intervention allocation to improve Nigeria’s immunization rates. The vaccination intervention optimizer is based on an integer linear program that seeks to maximize the cumulative probability of successful vaccination.

With the $250,000 grant from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, HelpMum will aim to successfully deploy ADVISER to achieve and ensure optimal vaccination of infants across Nigeria and also scale up its goal of improving maternal and infant health across Africa.

The AI solution- ADVISER would be incorporated into HelpMum existing Vaccination tracking tool so as to improve immunisation outcome and ensure more nursing mothers can present their children for immunisation

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About ADVISER

The AI-Driven Vaccine Intervention Optimiser framework was initially developed through HelpMum’s partnership with Vanderbilt University as part of the Google AI for Social Good program.

The framework, ADVISER, is an AI-Driven Vaccination Intervention Optimiser based on an integer linear program that seeks to maximise the cumulative probability of successful vaccination.

This will be the first deployment of an AI-driven vaccination uptake program in Nigeria.

Our optimization formulation is intractable in practice. We present a heuristic approach that enables us to solve the problem for real-world use cases. We also present theoretical bounds for the heuristic method.

He also added that the AI solution aims to tell which mother would default on immunising their kids as it will use the data and information provided by these mothers in the registration process to optimise their default tendencies.

The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation is a global 21st-century philanthropy bridging the frontiers of artificial intelligence, data science, and social impact to create a thriving, equitable, and sustainable future for all. The Foundation’s work focuses on bringing together academia, practitioners, and civil society to pursue the potential of AI and data science to address some of the world’s most urgent challenges.

The grant by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation is another milestone for HelpMum which has over the years been a recipient of grants funding from players in the health system globally like Facebook, Google , Global Citizen, United Nations Geneva, World Connect USA, International Youth Foundation and David weekley Foundation etc.

In 2021, HelpMum was announced as one of and the only African and among the Four Global winners for the 2021 Waislitz Global Citizen Award. HelpMum was selected as the winner for the Waislitz Global Citizen COVID – 19 Response award and went on to receive 50,000 dollars as part of winning the award.

Also, HelpMum was one of the winners of the Google impact challenge in 2018 which saw the enterprise get a 250,000 dollars  prize.

Recently, the company had its research paper on improving existing vaccination tracking system in partnership with Vanderbilt University and Google Research India, accepted by the International Joint conference on artificial intelligence organisation (IJCAI) which is one of the biggest gathering of organisations involved in AI.