Billy Rosemount was scared and in pain. The 24-year-old, who lives in a remote rural area in northern Ghana, had a miscarriage and feared for her life.
“I was bleeding and the midwife couldn’t control the blood,” she recalled.
Midwives at the local clinic had to transport her to a larger medical facility, which would have taken hours to arrive even if a traditional ambulance had arrived.
Instead, Rosemount was transported using a tricycle ambulance. The vehicle, powered by a motorcycle engine and designed to navigate narrow, rough roads in areas where ambulances are scarce or impractical, was designed by Moving Health, a non-profit organization tackling maternal mortality in Ghana.
The tricycle ambulance is equipped with a full-body stretcher, space for relatives and a midwife or community health worker, basic life support, an oxygen concentrator and an emergency birth kit.
Ms Rosemount received a medical emergency that day in October 2024 and has since recovered, but she says that without the tricycle ambulance, the average two-hour journey in her rural community would have been on the back of a motorcycle if a neighbor had lent her one.
“Having to go and beg someone to pick up the car… it’s been very, very, very difficult for us,” Rosemount said, adding that pregnant women in the area can’t always find transportation to the hospital. “So they have to just sit in the house and give birth…either the mother or the child could die.”
Although Ghana’s maternal mortality rate is decreasing slowly, it remains relatively high, at 234 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2023, lower than the regional average but 14 times higher than the United States. According to the World Health Organization, sub-Saharan Africa will account for about 70% of global maternal deaths in 2023.
Research shows that most of these maternal deaths occur in rural areas, where long distances increase the likelihood of delays in receiving life-saving care. Poverty and transportation instability can exacerbate these delays and increase risks.
Moving Health designs and manufactures tricycle ambulances at one-tenth the price of traditional vehicles and trains local health workers in emergency dispatch in the Upper West region of northern Ghana.
They report a 64% reduction in transport time from rural areas to hospitals.
“The biggest hurdle to surviving a medical emergency is not a lack of hospitals, but getting to the hospital in time,” said Emily Young, co-founder and CEO of Moving Health.
The effort began as an MIT project in 2016, designed by Young and several other mechanical engineering students, and established permanent operations in Ghana in 2019.
In 2020, Ghanaian news outlets reported that there were only 55 ambulances in service across the country. A 2024 study found that the country’s national ambulance service had grown to 356 ambulances for a population of about 35 million people. Moving Health has added 31 tricycle ambulances across five districts, serving more than 230,000 people in rural Ghana and areas not served by the National Ambulance Service.
Ambulances are kept at community-level clinics and can be reached via hotline or within reach by bike messenger if needed. Proximity is important when cell connectivity is unreliable.
For more complex treatment, patients are transported 50 to 100 kilometers (31 to 62 miles) away to larger regional, regional, or national hospitals.
Isaac Quansah, chief technology officer and country director at Moving Health, experienced the ambulance shortage first-hand after his wife gave birth to their first child.
Postpartum complications left her incapacitated and unable to find an ambulance, Quansah took her to the hospital in a small car, but she had to sit in excruciating pain.
“When I design an ambulance, I know there’s a reason,” he told CNN. “Helping other mothers not go through what my wife went through is my purpose in life.”
Quansah oversees local manufacturing in northern Ghana, where Moving Health employs and trains engineers.
Vehicles will be upgraded annually based on community feedback. After initial planning, health workers explained that it is common for women to give birth on the way to the hospital, sometimes at night.
“Can you imagine (giving birth to a baby) with a flashlight shining between your neck and shoulder?” Quansah said. “So they asked for a light, so we built it in. Now we can also deliver babies.”
Women were reluctant to go to the hospital alone, so another seat was added for a companion, and the driver revealed areas where the vehicle was weak on rough roads, so in the next model these were strengthened and equipped with shock absorbers.
“Ambulances continue to be improved throughout the year,” Quansah said.
Quansah oversaw the design of the vehicle’s online/offline GPS system. The system is designed to map ambulance locations, provide centralized coordination, and track time to hospital arrival even in locations where connectivity is unreliable.
An ambulance tricycle costs about $7,000, while a Basic Life Support Sprinter Van Ambulance costs between $75,000 and $110,000. Current vehicles are paid for by nonprofits and grants, but Moving Health hopes to make them more community-owned by developing a monthly payment system or a way for communities to split the cost 50-50 with local governments.
Each community with a tricycle ambulance has a locally managed Evergreen Fund to cover fuel, driver benefits and maintenance, rather than relying on ongoing external funding.
“Everyone is contributing,” Quansah said. “During the farming season, people donate food to sell or add to their supply,” he said, adding that the community considers the ambulance “not a luxury[but]a necessity.”
In addition to emergency dispatch, Moving Health Ambulances were also used to transport COVID-19 vaccines in 2020 and are now connecting remote communities with prenatal and postnatal health screenings.
In early 2026, Moving Health concluded a year-long “proof of concept” pilot with the Ghana Health Service and Grand Challenges Canada, funding 10 ambulances.
Last month, it was featured in the United Nations’ 2026 Science, Technology and Innovation Solution Book, along with 60 other projects from around the world.
Moving Health is currently raising funds from several nonprofit organizations and plans to expand across the country.
“Our (first) goal is to get national coverage in Ghana,” Young said. “But we think it could be a blueprint for other countries in sub-Saharan Africa.”
The nonprofit organization also plans to work with national emergency services to create a national centralized dispatch hub for emergency transportation.
“Moving Health, it saves a lot of lives…” said Rosemount, who is currently pregnant, again. “We are happy, grateful and pray for many more to come.”
