Delivering better health care to more Ethiopians

Kurabachew Abiyu providing technical support to a health extension worker

Kurabachew Abiyu – Delivering Better Health Care to More Ethiopians  

When he was just a one-year-old child, Kurabachew Abiyu was hospitalized at Jimma General Hospital with a serious illness. He was treated and fully recovered. Then, as a young adult, a close friend developed a software program that tracked patient visits at hospitals.

Those two events had enormous influence in Kurabachew’s career – first his choice to become a healthcare professional and second, his appreciation of technology – whether with software or mobile phones – to improve medical delivery services. He is now utilizing his expertise as WEEMA’s health Program Facilitator.

“When my mother told me that I was severely ill and had to be admitted to the hospital, it made me want to grow up to be a medical doctor,” said Kurabachew, who was born in Oromia but spent most of his childhood in Tembaro.

After graduating from Wolaita Sodo University with a public health degree, he helped run the Ambukuna Health Center in Tembaro. The experience brought him into contact with WEEMA, which was developing a mobile-phone-based medical tool, along with training, to help local health extension workers (HEWs) work more effectively in the field. “I think I was the first person to collaborate with WEEMA on the mHealth project,” said Kurabachew, of the digital tool that is now being used by over 140 health care workers and supervisors across the Tembaro and Hadero districts. 

The mobile-phone tool provides easy-to-use information, including videos, for diagnosing and treating key pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, and other common childhood illnesses. Health workers using the tool say it helps them deliver services more quickly and with fewer mistakes - resulting in healthier children.

Today, 18 months into his WEEMA job, Kurabachew has a larger portfolio of responsibilities, including clinics and hospitals, as well as public schools. And his scope of work is broader, ranging from child and maternal healthcare to menstrual health.

Kurabachew couldn’t be happier. “My main source of happiness is to help people,” he says, “so joining WEEMA, an organization that is aiding and empowering needy people, is like a dream becoming perfectly true.”