My name is Niek Versteegde, MD specialized in tropical medicine as well as family medicine and founder and CEO of GOAL 3. In 2015 I was working in a rural district hospital in Sengerema in Northern Tanzania as a tropical doctor. During this time I was doing a combination of clinical duties in maternal and neonatal care and project management. In Sengerema I experienced first-hand what it means to make an impact. One of the greatest successes was the erection of a neonatal intensive care department. This department helped to improve neonatal care and reduced mortality by 40% while the number of admissions increased from 500 to 1500. Unfortunately, I also know what it means if you cannot make this impact. I have seen dozens of children die from conditions that could have been treated easily. Despite the blessings of the improved neonatal care, neonatal mortality remained ten times higher compared to a western setting. Therefore a new and more scalable approach was needed. The realization of this has led me to explore in various directions for new approaches/solutions. Eventually, this exploration brought me to digital platform technologies and social entrepreneurship as means to make a positive impact in healthcare on a large and systemic scale. This has resulted in founding GOAL 3 two years ago. But most of all, these experiences drive me every day to make a success of GOAL 3.

 
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