m2m Hackathon 

Mothers2Mothers is game changing and award winning NGO that focuses on prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV. It features an innovative “mentor mother” model where HIV positive women teach and help community healthcare workers treat and care for other women who are HIV positive and going through the same treatment. The model helps empower women and reduce stigma in the community and leverages innovative technology to communicate and following them during the HIV prevention process.

Mothers2Mothers was going through a period of rapid growth and needed to make several business decisions around the best way to scale and enter new markets. The business model was struggling where the costs of direct implementation, or setting up and maintaining the area where the mentor mothers work, were difficult to be sustained without increasing the overall fundraising efforts. In order to decrease costs while scaling the model, a hackathon was hosted at the Impact Hub in Zurich to devise a plan for scale and implementation.

Tim and Mairead worked together on creating a plan for rapid scale up and implementation focusing both on the technology and finance to increase sustainability and decrease reliance on support from donors. The model focused on a way of building partnerships to take over parts of the mentor mother training and support while leveraging technology to handle the tracking and measure the indicators around the effectiveness of the program.

The results and feedback were noted by the partner of LGT VP and later presented to the board of M2M. Tim later went on to work with M2M where he saw results of the hackathon and idea generation for scaling the model brought into reality in Kenya where they worked with the government and local partners to implement the M2M model only with limited support of the main office and its resources.