Dr William Mapham - Vula Mobile Health Network

The programme has been an instrumental factor that enabled Vula to get started, grow and to switch from idea to commercial operations. It probably wouldn’t exist if the SAB Foundation Social Innovation Awards didn’t give it support.

Dr William Mapham, Founder of Vula Mobile App.

Vula is the brainchild of Dr William Mapham, who conceived the idea for the app while working at the Vula Emehlo Eye Clinic in rural Swaziland.

He experienced first-hand the difficulties faced by rural health workers when they needed specialist advice. In 2013, Vula was awarded the first prize of R1 million at the SAB Foundation Social Innovation Awards.

The prize money enabled him to launch the app for Android and iOS in July 2014 and helped him to shift from surviving on grant funding to generating revenue. The app was initially used only for ophthalmology referrals, but it quickly became clear that the functionality provided by Vula was widely needed.

Specialists from several different fields donated their time to work with the Vula team to design functionality for their own specialities with cardiology, orthopaedics and burn information added in April 2016.

This redesign enabled the app to scale to include referral forms for any number of specialities. The aim of the app is to give health workers – particularly those in remote rural areas – a tool that helps to get patients quick and efficient specialist care.

Furthermore, as a previous participant of the Social Innovation Awards, Dr Mapham was able to apply for the SAB Foundation Social Innovation Fund in 2017. This gave him access to a business accelerator and additional growth phase funding of R700 000 for his business. To date they have helped over 200 000 patients connect with over 10 000 specialists. Vula had no employees or revenue before partnering with the SAB Foundation. Today they employ 12 people and have an annual turnover of R3.6 million.