80% of neonatal deaths happen after discharge, at home, without follow-up. Connect KMC closes that gap with structured home visits for small and vulnerable newborns in their first 60 days, verified and paid only when confirmed.
Each home visit is a structured clinical encounter. Frontline Workers arrive with a scale, thermometer, pulse oximeter, and measuring tape. They assess weight, axillary temperature, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, head circumference, and feeding. Danger signs trigger an automated referral before the worker leaves.
Workers deliver Kangaroo wraps and nutritional support, position the newborn skin-to-skin, and observe a breastfeed. Feeding difficulty is one of the earliest signals of clinical deterioration in small newborns. Mothers also receive emotional support. Many face stigma and isolation after a high-risk birth.
Calibrated scale used at every visit. Weight-for-age tracking identifies faltering growth before it becomes acute malnutrition. Workers log the reading directly into the app and flag any drop from the prior visit.
Axillary temperature measured at every visit. Hypothermia is the leading preventable danger sign in small and vulnerable newborns. Any reading outside the normal range triggers an immediate referral pathway in the app.
Pulse oximeter reading captures respiratory status at each visit. Low saturation is an early indicator of distress before visible symptoms appear. The reading is logged alongside respiratory rate and breathing observation.
Structured checklist covering convulsions, jaundice, difficulty breathing, poor feeding, hypothermia, and abnormal skin color, with automatic referral generation when any is flagged. Workers do not leave until a referral plan is confirmed with the family. Facility linkages are pre-established.
When Nantume Madrine’s premature baby was discharged from a hospital in Mukono District, Uganda, she had almost no support. A Nama Wellness Center Frontline Worker enrolled her in Connect KMC within days. The baby thrived.
Nama Wellness Center trained 10 community health workers and reached 64 mother-baby pairs in Mukono in the first weeks of launch. Their post reads: "This is more than data. It is life, dignity, and second chances."
Two Ugandan partner organizations have now committed to delivering Connect KMC to an additional 5,000 Severely Vulnerable Newborns over the next year, expanding from Central Uganda into Eastern Uganda, with Uganda’s Ministry of Health signing an MoU targeting 50,000 Severely Vulnerable Newborns nationally over two years.
KMC is the program where Connect first applied outcome-based payment to newborn health. A few of the published findings:
If missing the window cost a worker money, we’d see suspiciously perfect compliance instead. So we treat it as a guardrail, not a payment criterion. We coach and integrate hospital discharge notifications to close the gap.
The headline 50% number understates the gap. The mean is 6.05 days. One delivery opportunity doesn’t collect hospital discharge dates at all, so 100% of those records are blank on this metric, which means the real-world bottleneck is data plumbing, not worker effort.
That covers partner engagement, the Kangaroo wraps, scales, thermometers, pulse oximeters, training, payment per verified case, and supervision. We picked it for our first individual-giving experiment because $60 is the smallest unit at which one donor can fund a complete intervention with verified delivery.
$60 covers the full Connect KMC cycle for one small and vulnerable newborn: Kangaroo wraps, scales, thermometers, pulse oximeters, Frontline Worker training, payment for visits, and supervision. Every dollar is tied to a verified outcome. Individual donors, foundations, and program funders all welcome.
