Janma Birth Kit

After many iterations, working with experts, medical health professionals and the women themselves, I should say it was not an easy process at all, but we had a simple and beautiful design. For a dollar more than what the existing product was offered for, at three dollars, we were able to deliver "Janma," a clean birth kit in a purse. Janma, meaning "birth," contained a blood-absorbing sheet for the woman to give birth on, a surgical scalpel, a cord clamp, a bar of soap, a pair of gloves, and the first cloth to wipe the baby clean. All this came packaged in a beautiful purse that was given to the mother as a gift after all her hard work, that she carried home with pride as a symbol of prosperity. One woman reacted to this gift. She said, "Is this really mine? Can I keep it?" The other one said, "Will you give me a different color when I have my next baby?" Better yet, a woman expressed that this was the first purse that she had ever owned in her life. The kit, aside from its symbolism and its simplicity, is designed to follow globally recommended medical protocol and serves as a behavior-change tool to follow steps one after the other. It can not only be used in homes, but also in institutional settings. To date, our kit has impacted over 600,000 mothers and babies around the world. It's a humbling experience to watch these numbers grow, and I cannot wait until we reach a hundred million.