In a second story boardroom the product owner brainstorms on a whiteboard as he describes “minimum viable product” (MVPs) cycles. The lead developer fluently articulates the cultural dichotomy between Oracle’s Java programming language and Google’s more recent Kotlin. The setting: not San Francisco’s Marina, but Nairobi, Kenya. The product owner: physician Steve Letchford. The developers: Kenyans. The clients: IT managers in an industry characterized for its luddite backwardness: healthcare (together, the IT managers oversee 7 regional hospitals, and 40 clinics). The tech social enterprise: Banda Health (https://www.bandahealth.org/).

Their goal: to provide IT solutions for low-resource healthcare providers. And they want to do it quick: getting “Banda Go” software into 500 clinics serving Africa’s poorest by 2020. But their approach is rich with the novel tools of Silicon Valley.

In 2011 the latest management efficiency paradigm known as the “Lean Startup” swept across the startup world. “Build, measure, learn” became common parlance, with the “minimum viable product” (MVP) serving as the cornerstone tool in the process to learn from users and subsequently iterate as quickly as possible.

When we met with the Banda Health team, their lead developer adroitly described the current MVP iteration to the African healthcare IT managers. And even in the two hour conversation we sat in on, Banda quickly learned two key ways they could strengthen their MVP. First, by having patients note their next of kin at time of registration they could reduce fraud. Second, that by offering data connectivity in parallel to the software, they could rapidly increase adoption in a country like Kenya where rural health outposts’ lack reliable internet connection and would otherwise impede adoption.

In healthcare, an industry wrought with technology that makes the lives of its users more, instead of less, difficult (to the point where you get satire like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB_tSFJsjsw), Banda Health is actually making progress, and we had the privilege of seeing that progress firsthand. At the end of the meeting where clients actually got to express what would be helpful (unfortunately exceedingly rare in the tech world even in the States), the healthcare IT manages decided they would pilot at a clinic a few hours outside Nairobi, and expand to the other clinics once they worked out the kinks in the current MVP.

The Banda Health team is still in early product development cycles, but as a digital health geek, I was amazed that I found an example of health tech successfully leveraging lean principles at all, and as a global health advocate, encouraged that the exemplar existed in Africa.