Announcing Finalists for the African Palliative Care Association Radical Innovation Challenge
New Ideas
The global need for high-quality palliative care is great, yet access to high-quality care remains a significant challenge worldwide. In a powerful response to this, the African Palliative Care Association and members of the Scientific Committee, in partnership with Global Treehouse, Cambridge Africa Programme, and International Children’s Palliative Care Network, designed and launched the first-ever African Palliative Care Association (APCA) Radical Innovation Challenge.
Created to spark new ideas that transform palliative care and bereavement support across the continent, the APCA Radical Innovation Challenge actively invites ‘blue-sky thinking’ to enhance the quality, accessibility, delivery, equity and effectiveness of care for individuals with serious illnesses and their families in Africa.
For this project, innovation means creating, adopting or adapting new ways of working—whether through policies, practices, systems, or technologies—to make care more effective and accessible. This builds on innovation frameworks from the World Health Organization and The Children’s Palliative Care Provider of the Future: A Blueprint to Spark, Scale, and Share Innovation Report, with a focus on technology, scalable models, and data-driven approaches.
The culminating event is a live competition which will be held during the 8th International African Palliative Care & Allied Services Conference 2025 in Gaborone, Botswana, in September 2025. The partners are sponsoring a prize and mentorship to support implementation.
Spotlight on the finalists
The finalists for the APCA Innovation Challenge 2025 demonstrate a remarkable array of creative solutions. Leveraging new technologies presents a key opportunity for innovation across palliative care, including services for children, adolescents and their families to have improved access to resources and services globally. Kudos to the finalists:
Nuhamin Tekle Gebre – Ethiopia: This digitally-enabled home-based model turns basic mobile phones into powerful palliative care tools—empowering community health workers with adaptive decision support, symptom tracking and specialist mentorship. It’s a smart, scalable leap toward equitable chronic care in low-resource communities.
Priscilla Baaba Halm – Ghana: ValleyUP formalizes home-based palliative care in Ghana with a mobile-first platform that connects trained caregivers, tracks care delivery, and ensures quality through licensing and AI support. It’s the Uber of community health—safe, trusted and ready to scale nationwide.
Margaret Kamau – Kenya: This teen-focused Telegram-based social space connects adolescents facing terminal illness for expression, comfort, and community—supported by palliative care specialists in a safe, secure environment.
Zama Ndlazi – South Africa: This innovation advocates for integrating palliative care into mental health services within South Africa’s psychiatric hospitals—uniting fragmented systems and restoring dignity in life and death for society’s most marginalized.
Nahla Gafer – Sudan: This hospital-based model embeds palliative care within every department, training specialists, establishing link nurses and fostering early referrals. With a vision to become a training and research hub, it aims to institutionalize palliative care as every clinician’s responsibility, not a specialty silo.
Diana Nabunje Lubega – Uganda: mPallCare bridges communication gaps in palliative care with an intuitive app and web dashboard that empowers patients, clinicians, and policymakers. Already piloted in a refugee settlement, this platform offers scalable, data-driven care for some of Africa’s most vulnerable populations.
Elisha Nampwera – Uganda: A game-changing GSM-based bracelet and app system revolutionises palliative care in low-resource settings—offering real-time fall alerts, medication reminders, and caregiver support even without internet access. Designed with deep local insight, this innovation brings dignity, safety and timely care to the most underserved.
Shupikai Chisero – Zimbabwe: Zimbabwe’s Kunda-Nqob’I TB project demonstrates the positive impact of integrating palliative care into community-based TB services through trained volunteers and community health workers, providing a model for scaling PC across various diseases in Africa.
We look forward to seeing who emerges as the top innovators from this inspiring group and how their work will contribute to shaping a future where high-quality palliative care is accessible to all children and families across Africa and beyond.