Aika Matemu

Aika has committed her career to building innovations that impact social change. She is a Partner at Dalberg Design and leads the Africa Design practice. Her over 15 year experience spans across multiple sectors from large healthcare conglomerates in Canada to social enterprises working in the most hard to reach communities in East, Southern and Western Africa. Across health sectors, she’s supported businesses, governments, and nonprofits to reach underserved markets through human-centered community led, product and service design, leveraging a range of qualitative and quantitative research and analysis methodologies. She manages a multi-disciplinary team of Designers based in Nairobi and Dakar and led Design research engagements throughout Africa with clients such as the United Nations Girls Education Initiative, Wellcome Trust, Marie Stopes International, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, MasterCard Foundation, AMREF and World Health Organization; on a range of health interventions to create innovative products and services with a keen eye on applying implementation science to support sustainable models.

Aika has worked at various levels of the health system from engaging directly with the end users of technology and designing with and for them to discussing health policy and governance with National level Ministries of Health. When working for the social enterprise Jacaranda Health in Kenya, she designed and developed a number of mobile based innovations including: a mobile savings product for women to save for their pregnancy delivery, a maternity mobile health SMS service that guides women through the course of their pregnancy and a digital service for men to participate in reproductive health conversations. This digital application has since reached over 1 million mothers across Kenya who are actively using the service to report danger signs during pregnancy. Through her work with Medic Mobile and in partnership with community based organizations in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi and Togo, Aika led in the design of a community based digital health tool to support care coordination of maternal and child services in marginalized and last mile communities. With health interventions focus on improving health outcomes for Maternal Newborn and Child Health and driving increased uptake of Family Planning and Reproductive Health products and services. She has served on the WHO informal expert groups for mobile solutions for Cervical Cancer, is a member of the Kenya Health Informatics association and has contributed to governance and policy discussions on the Kenya Ministry of Health Community Health Strategy reform. Aika holds a Bachelor of Science in Computational Biochemistry from Carleton University, Post Graduate Certificate in Health Informatics from George Brown College. She is an Acumen East Africa 2015 Fellow.