Week 1
How it all began…
The first thing we did when we started working on our “One product” project was to choose a field that our project could help improve. We realized that health issues remain the top priorities in developing and the less developed countries. We asked someone from our entourage in medical school if she had an idea of a sector we could help in those countries. She told us about how HIV was often transmitted from mother to child through breastfeeding.
In some countries, especially the ones with a high level of HIV infection, HIV positive women don’t have many choices when it comes to feeding infants. An alternative to breast-milk would be baby formula, but bottle-feeding comes with other health risks as the water is easily contaminated. For mothers, it is impossible to choose between potentially transmitting the virus through breastfeeding, and exposing their child to other —possibly deadly— diseases by not breastfeeding.
Therefore our idea is to sell baby formula in developed countries, and use the profits to build a company that would make powdered milk in Swaziland. We chose to invest there because it has the world’s highest HIV-infection rates among the adults.
However, contaminated water remains the main problem, so making baby formula won’t be useful if we don’t come up with a solution to have clean water. Therefore, we would also like to set up either water pumps or find a way to filter the water at the same time.
Swazybaby 