Embrace

Saving Low Birth Weight BabiesIn the World's Poorest Regions

Location: Central America, sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan, India, China
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Embrace has developed, supports, and continues to innovate a low-cost infant warmer that can save the lives of low birth weight and premature babies in the poorest regions of the world. Every year, more than 1 million of these infants die within the first month of life; almost all of the deaths occur in developing countries.

As students in Stanford’s Design for Extreme Affordability program in 2008, Embrace’s founders were charged with designing an intervention for neonatal hypothermia that cost less than 1% of the $20,000 needed for a state-of-the-art incubator. The product they developed, and have subsequently refined, is a fabric cocoon suffused with re-heatable pouches of a wax-like substance. This small, lightweight, portable sleeping bag is safe and easy to use; a baby wrapped in the Embrace product stays warm without electricity or moving parts. It can be easily sanitized for re-use and costs less than $25.

Embrace will use its Project Redwood grant to distribute infant warmers through the Kisenyi Hospital in Kampala, Uganda, and to provide the education and training necessary to make a measurable and sustainable impact on survival of low birth weight babies there.

For more information, see: http://embraceglobal.org.

GRANT SUMMARY AND PURPOSE

  • $20,000 to distribute about 60 Infant Warmers and provide supporting training. (2014)

IMPACT

Protection of more than 400 low birth weight babies, training for about 200 health care workers, and education for about 400 mothers and caregivers.