How Kenyan innovation is offering faster emergency response to millions

A Kenyan company and its app, AURA, is using technology to improve emergency responses and save lives across the continent.

Some African nations lack public-run emergency medical services [EMS]. Kenya is in the midst of rolling out its first national response program. Until now, private companies, such as Pulse Emergency Medical Response, have had to operate on their own to provide life saving measures.

The owner and CEO of Pulse EMR, Margaret Gitau, says getting into patients’ homes can be challenging.

“In some parts of the country we do have network blackouts. So, there is latency there and at times we have got electricity problems such that when someone wants to be assisted you get to their destination and you find that they don’t have power on their telephones. So, it becomes a bit of a challenge even to locate them,” Margaret told CNN’s Victoria Rubadiri In the latest episode of Connecting Africa.

To improve efficiency, first responders often rely on tech companies like AURA to connect them with those in need.

Victor Odera, the Kenyan Country Manager of AURA, says: “We give users access to these emergency services, to the exact GPS location anywhere, anytime by connecting them to a network of vetted private emergency response providers.”

In Kenya, AURA partners with dozens of private response companies covering more than 40 cities and towns, offering assistance from roadside to medical emergencies.

Odera explains how they compete with other companies in this space, “we’re able to cater to people who do not want to download an application. We have the phone call modality. Now we also looking at panic buttons. We are also now looking at wearables, your smart watches. So very different and very varied channels through which you’re able to get our product and our solution to the hands of many people.”

CNN’s Eleni Giokos spoke in the CNN studio with the co-founder and CEO of AURA, Warren Meyers. He delved into what problems he had when he founded the company, and importantly, the impact that it’s having, “when we started the business in 2017, people could get a taxi or a pizza quicker than they could get help when they’re dying, having an emergency, and that obviously didn’t make sense. So what we did was build a platform marketplace where […] we provide technical access to mass market audiences so that we can effectively democratize access to emergency response services.”

Giokos asks Meyers what his vision is for the next five years, “at the moment we haven’t set up r our product in North Saharan, so, Morocco and Egypt, massively growing markets. As well as in the French speaking countries. So that’s the new frontier of enabling our service across those regions and then just generally doubling down on partnerships that enable not just specific country distribution, but Africa distribution.”