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We Have Provided 7,000 Women with Our Antenatal Services and 80,000+ with Our Birth Kits – Kobusingye Mackline

April 7, 2025

We Have Provided 7,000 Women with Our Antenatal Services and 80,000+ with Our Birth Kits – Kobusingye Mackline

Kobusingye Mackline, the Founder and Executive Director of VitalCare Connect, dedicated to improving maternal and infant healthcare for underserved pregnant women and infants in rural Uganda.

Through mobile clinics, she ensures essential healthcare reaches remote areas. Her outstanding work earned her recognition as a winner in the 2023 Savvy Fellowship Program.

With a Social Sciences degree and life coaching certification, Kobusingye Mackline’s expertise empowers underserved communities for healthier lives.

Kobusingye Mackline shared with Today Africa about her entrepreneurial journey.

Could you please tell us about yourself?

Kobusingye Mackline, that’s my name and I’m a Ugandan by birth and by nationality. And I’m a founder of VitalCare Connect, an initiative that brings maternal health care in rural and underserved communities in Uganda.

And we do this by use of mobile clinics and reaching out to homes and communities. I’m also a life coach and a trainer at Social Innovation Academy. I’ve done this for 10 years now. And for three years, I’ve been in VitalCare Connect.

So apart from that, I’m a bachelor in social sciences. So I’m a social worker and over the past three years, I’ve been an entrepreneur and I’ve earned recognition with the survey fellowship prize 2023.

I have been a Mandela Washington Fellow of 2024. And I have been a young African leader of 2023 East Africa. I participated in the Stand Big Incubation Program for Women and Acumen Gender Equity and Acceleration 2023.

I have read a lot of books on entrepreneurship and also I have trained over 5,000+ youths under Social Innovation Academy and Jang International through life coaching and also being the trainer of coaches, certifying different coaches in the organization.

And I’m bringing you some of my expertise in dealing with youth and with women as well coming from the local communities impacting women and youth.

What really inspired you to start VitalCare Connect?

I’m not far from where I started because I’m a social worker by profession. So I did not do social work for the past seven years back. I was just doing the empowerment of youth. And along 2019, the journey started for VitalCare, though it wasn’t shaped that way.

I had a pregnancy and I’m a mother of two boys. So my second pregnancy was a little bit complicated at the end because this is the time of COVID-19. And this is the time when I had to lay off my work and get back to my home, which is Western Uganda, being taken care of by my mother and my sister.

I was heavily pregnant for seven months. So this time I had stayed at least, I think, eight to nine plus years without staying in this community. I didn’t know what was really happening.

So this is the time I realized that accessing a healthy facility nearby, it takes three hours for anyone to reach by simple transportation of motorcycle. And also the road was bad to just ride easily.

So the first time we attended antenatal, it wasn’t easy for me. We just had to use a bicycle and that was my brother taking me to the health facility. But then the last time I was supposed to have my child birth it came unannounced.

And I had to find ways. It was getting late in the evening at around 7 p.m. So we had to find ways to get to the health facility though. At that time, no car in Uganda, no motorcycle could move without a license or a permission because of the COVID transmission and all that.

So that took us longer to figure out how to get to the healthy facility. But along the way, we managed to reach and this time we had to spend three hours figuring out how to get there and another three hours to reach the health facility with a little transport of a motorcycle by my brother.

Getting there wasn’t easy because it was night. But then the professional medic wasn’t there, who is the doctor, who had attended another facility. So we had to wait. But at the same time, my condition was escalating.

This is the time I fainted and I became unconscious. So getting referred, it took us more than three hours to figure out the ambulance to get there in another healthy facility, which is in Mbarara.

I realized one thing after getting out of the unconscious, I was on oxygen with my baby. And this is after I was saved by a professional doctor under caesarean. And to me, this was a catching eye, getting out and finding my mother and my sister very excited about the situation.

But getting home, it took us longer to heal, but also physically and emotionally I had to keep thinking about the whole scenario. So getting back to work, where I was empowering youth, I had to keep thinking bigger on what is actually currently happening in the community that I had stayed longer without visiting.

That is the time I met a midwife whom I was working with, but I realized she has also abandoned that midwife because of the situation she didn’t like to share most of the time that happens in the health facilities.

We had a conversation and we agreed that surely we can do something. So me and my husband and nurse Babra, we had to figure out the concept of getting to the healthy facilities.

Talking about what is happening at the healthy facilities with health workers and find out why don’t they at least use a different model for women to be able to understand the situation they are in, because we do not know where to start.

But that was also the right time that we happened to meet thirty women in the village and they shared their experience. Most of them were frustrated with the long distances to the health facilities, less resources after getting there, but also long queues waiting to get the services.

And most, they are also frustrated with how they are responded to in terms of their attention. So that lacked a little bit of connection by the health workers to the women, but also a little bit of women being poor, not able to afford public health facilities where they can’t be easily attended to.

But of course it comes with a cost. So those conversations opened our eyes and we’re like, okay, what do we do? This was 2022 and the easiest thing that we could do, is to start bringing out information, maternal health information.

During the maternal health information, we realized that surely women need more than just healthy services. They need to connect to the person who is attending to them.

They need to share more than what they are sharing in terms of how their home is set up, how they are supported at home, and how they can get the services. That’s how we organized a model, which is a mobile clinic.

Mobile clinic is a moving clinic that attends to women wherever they are in different places, finding them in their communities and providing services they would get if they get to the health facilities.

But also getting involved with people who are next to women, for example, their husbands and their families, as well as the community health workers who are always around them and sharing with them.

That’s where we started working with most of the community health workers who mobilize women. As for us, we bring in our mobile nurses, getting in the community with pregnancy checks, medication, referrals, deliveries.

And then along the way we realized that only that is not enough when women come with no resources at the time of childbirth. We added the birth kits. So bath kits are these essentials that are needed by midwives for next childbirth, including sterilized gloves, cotton, cord tie, all those essentials.

They could hinder women to get to healthy facilities because they could get embarrassed whenever they don’t have or even they have to wait. So we added that package that we provide to women as well.

In 2024, we just realized most of the babies are born with less weight because of the poor feeding of mamas. And also the babies after six months, they are not fed well because of lack of knowledge and resources as well.

So we added nutritional storage. So that’s how we have three combinations of things, the antenatal, the birth kits and then the nutritious support to be able to eliminate maternal health in Uganda.

What other services do you provide outside the three that you mentioned?

Everything that we bring out is for maternal health. When we talk about the antenatal and postnatal, here we have different packages. We have the pregnancy checks, we have the deliveries.

We give the referrals in case somebody needs a referral and cannot handle the situation. So we have the immunization for babies and the information on family planning methods.

And then for the birth kits project, we have information about the hygiene and clean self-bath situation for women accompanied with the hygienic and clean bathing items, which are the birth kits with all the essential items.

And then we have added nutritious porridge to cater for nutritional challenges, to solve nutritional challenges faced by pregnant women and mothers. Those are the services we are offering.

And along the way, we have the mobile reminders for women that we send to, to allow them to be able to attend the services they get. So we do this with follow-ups and home visits, as well as holding outreaches in their name of mobile clinics, getting to community after community and after community giving these services.

We are not located in one place. We are in different places giving these services. But most importantly, we are in two districts. So we have Ibanda district and Rugaaga and then extend 40 % of our profit to refugee communities.

Because they cannot really afford it, the refugee women, especially the single mothers and the teen pregnant girls.

What were the challenges that you faced and how did you overcome them?

Figuring out the vision is easy, but implementing what you say you do is really always a challenge. At first, what was really hitting was how to start and who to reach to start.

So first, as I say, I wasn’t a medical professional. I needed some people who had medical information with them. I had to tell my story to different people to get accepted on who is to be on board.

And it wasn’t about also accepting. It was about how they understand what I say and how does it resonate with what they are heading to do? So that was really a tough time. I think I remember having conversations with almost all my friends and I couldn’t get any of them to be interested.

Next, is that the people I started with were three after starting real work on ground when even I had a nurse in the team.

She was the person to get out fast. How? Something came up and I think she had personal things to pass you and she laid it out. I’m like, how are you going to get to where you just started and we are supposed to get into the community?

And she’s like, no, I just realized I have to go on for school. I couldn’t do anything, so I let her go and I started a fresh search to find who is fit. First of all, in Uganda, you cannot do anything when you’re not legally registered, when you’re not consenting with the law.

And there are needed licenses and all the other things that we need. So I couldn’t do those things. I need people who have an academic background on health and we’ll be able to do that. I had to move and find someone who resonates. So that was really a challenge of the team.

Secondly, after getting the people, now it was how do we start? We just had to face the hard reality. We have to spend on things that we do not think of. I had not joined any entrepreneurship program to schedule and plan and strategize on what is to spend on and what is not.

Everyday we could wake up, we realized, yes, we need to go to the community, but we need fuel. We need to go to the community, but we need to spend on this thing.

Another frustration was when we realized the problem is too much than what we can afford and what women say they have trust in us and not getting what we are giving. They are not satisfied with what we are giving at the moment.

Because the first thing, we are just giving information and telling them. And they are like, okay, we have heard these things. Many people have told us. But then, can I find a solution to what you say? How can I do it practically?

So we needed resources and finances, which was not there. How could we now get out of that? We started looking for different opportunities, talking to different people on how to get resources on board. Then we reduced the number of how we are moving very fast from village to village.

We had to first capitalize on one village. And a few individuals started with 30 women. We couldn’t add any other women in the first year of 2022. We stayed with 30 women throughout.

Because we needed to at least confirm what we are giving, have conversations with these women and find out the change they are having and how different we can become from other parties in the same industry.

Those are some of the challenges and we started looking for resources, applying for different kinds of proposals and all that, were not accepted. And we are told by different mentors and different business coaches, it is better to build a network.

It is better to build a big network for yourself so that at least when people have known you, they will not invest in what you do, they will invest in you. So it was really a hard challenge.

Because exposure in entrepreneurship wasn’t there. So that’s when me and my team, we got out of shells and started getting into the innovation program of entrepreneurship and getting to learn with the intention at least to make a network, not to get money.

Because the first was money. But this time we’re like, okay, we just need to go and get to be known to do something and we get people who are connecting with us.

And, yeah, with time, it is becoming somehow easy, but it was not easy because 2022 itself was almost a change of models, change of people, change in clients, on focusses and everything.

2023 was more of learning, international programmes, getting into this from this to this, from this to this, until when we were able to shape our model and then we could also win some prizes along the way and we supported ourselves slowly by slowly.

How are you raising capital or money to sustain these services and products?

At first, we wanted to give these services to people who cannot afford, completely who cannot afford. And then we realized that in order to do that, we need to have enough resources, at least $51 per woman, to be able to have their antenatal and postnatal at least for one year.

And then we realized few individuals and few donations can do that to us. What we say we did is to extend our services to those women who earn but are also not able to have access to our services. So we started charging some of our services.

And along the way we realized this is not going to be enough. We have also seen there is money left on the table in the birth kit projects. Many people who are doing these businesses are in towns, are in urban places, and they are not reaching the community.

Yes, community people are accessing them at a very big price. So we started doing it by ourselves because it could help us. Every woman we could meet could buy this package outside the services they get.

So also organizations, companies, and healthy facilities could buy as well. So we made sure that at least 40 % of what we get is extended to those who can afford in terms of our services. For example, for a birth kit, if we sell, we have two packages, we have the small package and then we have the labor suit package.

If three labor suit packages are sold, then one woman who can’t afford it would get one small package of $6 if we sell the other one at $9. And then we also did the same with the antenatals.

So if we get a woman who buys the antenatals, three of them are able to pay for one woman for half of their antenatals. This was something that we needed badly. So that’s how we started doing it. That’s how we started doing it in the time when we did not have enough resources.

How do these women access the information you provide?

In our way of working with local communities, we have two models. One, we have the physical where we meet women gather, the gathering all one-on-one during the follow-up sessions and home visits. This is where the women can get the information.

Secondly, women always get our information through the media channels. So this is the local radios and TV, television. So hosting a television show and community radio information would also support women to get the information.

Then thirdly is the information that we forward, which is customized to a mother depending on the level they are at via their small phone using an app where we send that information depending on what kind of situation a woman is at.

And this is only done in a customized way. So information is very essential for us because it is one of the hindrances to the challenges that women face because of beliefs and customs and means they have around maternal.

This hinders a lot of progress if it is not tackled. So that’s how the women get information.

How were you able to build a culture that helps in smooth running of your business?

I would go back to my personal story. People connect with people on a personal level. The first thing that really supported me was to be authentic and tell a story about who I am and what I’m able to do and what I’m not to do.

I realized that losing people is not bad, so long as someone understands where you’re going and they don’t connect. And then getting somebody to join you, for three years, the people we have been those who have connected deeply.

Secondly, most of the time we have two people, for example. How to expand depends on how we are bringing other people around us into what we are doing and how they feel comfortable.

So environment and culture is important. Information sharing is another thing that is important. But most importantly is telling the vision, where are you going? Why are you into this?

This brings more people than what you’re able to give them. So along the way we have had people who have been with us for volunteership and we have had women who have come for commission based.

Probably they are selling, they are distributing our birth kits and they are only getting a little commission. But apart from that, they do more than what they’re supposed to do. They give information on birth kits, they educate women and they are able to join us.

So working with community health workers who were already on ground was like an open door for us. And how do we get them, when you get one community health worker? That one brings another friend and another friend brings another friend.

So it is a referral and recommendation of basis than just putting an announcement we want so and so. For the beginning when we were three people and then for the past year, we had six people. And currently, we are working with 52 people.

What I mean is that 52 people are all inside maternal health, have been participating in health programs, but haven’t found how to connect, coordinate with each other.

So what we give is a community engagement and involvement on how everyone could bring themselves to make a purpose for something and contribute an impact. I think for me, the biggest takeaway is people always want to get into something they feel connected to and contributing to.

And if they’re able to get that space where they feel contributing and what they get is not the matter because they always feel they are contributing to something bigger. So that’s how we have been able to reach out to different individuals, health-wise and those who are outside the health industry.

How is VitalCare Connect doing today and what does the future look like?

Currently, VitalCare Connect is able to hold 10 mobile clinics per month. And in the 10 mobile clinics, we are able to meet 3,000 different women in different communities with our products and services.

We are also working with 21 men and 31 women so that at least where we need a man’s voice, it is reached and where we need a woman’s voice, is reached because we realized the majority of the people who pay for either product, are men.

Women are the ones who use, men are the ones who pay. We need to have them engaged. So this has really been a great shift for us. And the current state we have for the three years we have worked together with women and men, this shifted us to reach 80,000+ individuals with our services.

7,000 have received our antenatal services and 80,000+ have received our nutritious porridge and birth kits. We cannot do this alone. We have been working together with private and organizations that work together with women in health and outside health.

There are companies and organizations who are working outside health, but they want to do something in the health sector. So they would work with us and trust us because we are already inside and it makes sense to collaborate and make partnerships.

And above all, I think what has made us move faster is every time we are in the network, as I told you, any network we have has brought a different network for us. We find ourselves getting a network that brings more other networks and that’s how we happen to get our collaborators and our partners on board.

In the future, we are looking forward to extending much of our services in refugee communities. We also realize that there are those people who never have a chance to make their own money and sustain themselves.

And those are people who are worked on and who have got out of their communities because of the challenges. Uganda currently is hosting approximately 1.8 million who are refugees from Sudan, Congo and Burundi and all other countries.

So 84 % are the women and children who really need a lot of support and cannot afford it. It is much for us to think on how we can contribute to them.

Only if we are able to scale up our 40 % of our profit that we offer to refugee communities, we’ll be able to serve these communities with our services, especially if we can start with fewer that we can have.

For example, in Western Uganda, we have Nkivale refugee community, Chaka 1 and Chaka 2, and Changsari refugee community. We have approximately four refugee communities. And these are hosting people from different countries, speaking different languages, leading these services.

What are the key lessons that you have learned in your journey as an entrepreneur?

What I’ve learned is that it’s never hard and it’s never easy. It’s never hard if you start immediately, you will always share and get support from the people around you.

People talk about what you want in life and how you want to get there, what you want and what you want to get. They will figure out how to get there. How to get there is always figured out along the way.

Then secondly, my learning is that entrepreneurship is a lonely journey. If it doesn’t involve personal awareness and personal growth. I think I have gotten involved in different platforms like the Young African Leaders Programme, talking about leadership and how to get yourself as a leader before you lead others, how to lead yourself.

It can be so overwhelming. So it is a combination of getting involved in different programs that uplifts us, individuals, before we think about uplifting other people and know how to work on ourselves and deal with whatever is running inside us so that we can offer the best out of that.

And it’s not going to be a hit in the first few years. Maybe one day I can wake up, I’ve been waking up, while feeling so down not to even think about doing something in maternal health.

I’m just thinking about, okay, so this challenge is available, but there are people who are doing well without figuring out why they need to meet other people’s needs. They just get out and get employed and you just work for money and you get what you want.

But then it is important to align yourself with what makes you happy. Some people like us, once you already have a struggle that needs to meet someone’s or some people’s need, every time you work for money, you get empty.

You get it and then you feel like, okay, I think this is not all. Maybe I needed to have some impact somewhere. So it is important to always listen to stuff and go on.

Today I’m meeting you and we’re having this conversation. I don’t know how you got me. I think from LinkedIn. So this is the reason why you just need to start moving.

People will meet us along the way and people with the best for us will always meet us and we always have to connect anyway. So never fail to start.

What advice would you give to women who want to start their business?

I would actually say that when your mother and a woman, you can be a woman without being a mother, but you’re only a mother and a woman at the same time. You have got to think bigger every day.

Because that is how you can forgo and sacrifice your own dreams to the children and to the family and forget your existence in life. As a woman, today I celebrate women because I remember that as a woman, there are many hindrances that get us to lose our focus and our purpose in life.

And we think that we’re probably doing the right thing until we end up getting out and we feel empty and lonely. Because we gave it all to the family and we didn’t think about the purpose.

But also as a mother, family matters because a family is the source of energy that we work up with every day to get to work. So today I’m here talking to you and my son is on my side and he’s asking me, mommy, can I get something from you?

I would have to balance this life. I have to balance on how to take care of myself, take care of the third party, which is my family, and also do that business as well.

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