Amani Kibunguchy

Ugandan inventor revolutionizing rural healthcare through mobile tech

Amani Kibunguchy (b. 1975) is a Ugandan biomedical engineer and creator of MedLink, a mobile health platform that connects rural patients with doctors via SMS and basic phones. Her system has provided critical care to over 500,000 people in 12 African countries since 2005. Kibunguchy's innovation won the 2012 UN ICT4D Award for bridging healthcare gaps in low-income regions.

Her Telemedicine for All initiative developed low-cost diagnostic tools like the MobileStethoscope, which attaches to feature phones for real-time heart and lung analysis. This device has reduced maternal mortality rates by 34% in pilot regions. Kibunguchy's partnership with MTN Uganda created the Health4All SMS service, now used by 1.2 million subscribers.

In 2018, she launched the African Health Innovators Network, a pan-African consortium of 200+ healthcare tech startups. Her work has been profiled in Nature Medicine and MIT Technology Review. Kibunguchy's latest project, Malaria Monitor, uses AI to predict outbreak hotspots with 92% accuracy, saving an estimated 15,000 lives annually in sub-Saharan Africa.