Soso Care: My Healthcare and I
About Soso Care:
is a social enterprise that aims to use garbage as a financial resource to enable millions of uninsured slum dwellers especially pregnant women and kids to access micro health insurance as well as micro capital for petty trade.
Our Problem:
Healthcare systems in Nigeria are weak and providing micro health insurance for the poor is expensive and hard. Because millions of poor people have unstable income these makes insurance product an expensive luxury. Every year Nigeria dumps over 34 million tons of waste which affects the environment and slum areas.
Shared value:
We believe these waste products can be converted into an economic value which will help to finance healthcare needs of the poor living in slums and even help them save micro capital for petty trade. By linking garbage to healthcare access and petty capital, we are killing 3 birds with one stone through the following:
• Access to healthcare to reduce self medication, infant and maternal mortality in these regions.
• Improving sanitation & environment in slums and
• Lifting millions out of desperate forms of poverty through petty capital and creating jobs for the distribution network (vendors) and waste collectors who register as agents.
How Soso Care Works:
Members can access care and save for petty business capital by delivering recyclable materials like bottles, glass, plastics Bags of our agreed Kilogram monthly to our partner agents who sells the collected waste to big recycling companies as raw materials. The money generated from the sales is converted into health fund to finance the insurance premium and micro capital. the scheme will end up encouraging communities to organize and create sustainable financing from their own waste resources.
Measuring Success and Impact:
The value is far beyond skepticism since users have nothing to lose than submit trash for a pay. We tried reaching out within 6 weeks we had about 96 signups from women. By the end of this year we are looking at over 45,000 users. Because the model is scalable and replicable in job creation for vendors and users.
