Billeh Rosemount was scared and in pain. The 24-year-old from a remote farming community in Northern Ghana was having a miscarriage, and she feared for her life.
“I was bleeding and the midwife could not control the blood,” she recalled.
The midwife at her community clinic had to transfer her to a bigger health facility but a conventional ambulance would have taken hours to arrive, if it had come at all.
Instead, Rosemount was transported using a tricycle ambulance. Powered by a motorcycle engine and engineered to navigate narrow, rough roads in areas where ambulances are either scarce or impractical, the vehicle was designed by Moving Health, a nonprofit tackling maternal mortality in Ghana.
Inside the tricycle ambulances is a full-length stretcher, space for a relative and a midwife or community health worker, basic life support, an oxygen concentrator, and emergency birthing kits.
Rosemount received emergency care that day in October 2024 and recovered, but she says that without the tricycle ambulance, the journey, an average of two hours for rural communities, would likely have been on the back of a motorbike — if her neighbor was willing to lend one.
“You have to go and beg for somebody to get the vehicle … It was very, very, very difficult for us,” Rosemount said, adding that pregnant women in the community could not always find transport to hospital. “Due to that, you have to just sit in the house and give birth… you can lose one of the lives, the mother or the child.”
Though slowly declining, maternal mortality in Ghana remains comparatively high with 234 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2023 — lower than the regional average but 14 times higher than in the US. Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for around 70% of global maternal deaths in 2023, according to the World Health Organization.
Studies show that most of these maternal deaths occur in rural areas, where distance makes delays in receiving lifesaving care more likely. Poverty and unreliable transportation can exacerbate these delays and increase risk.
Moving Health designs and manufactures tricycle ambulances in the Upper West Region of Northern Ghana, at what it says is one tenth of the price of conventional vehicles, and then trains community health workers to run emergency dispatch.
It reports having seen a 64% decrease in transport time to hospitals from rural communities.
“Sometimes the biggest barrier to surviving a medical emergency isn’t the lack of hospitals,” said Emily Young, CEO and co-founder of Moving Health, “it’s being able to get there in time.”
The initiative began as a project at MIT in 2016, designed by Young and a few other mechanical engineering students, and established permanent operations in Ghana in 2019.
In 2020, a Ghanian news outlet reported that only 55 ambulances served the entire country. A 2024 study found that the country’s National Ambulance Service had grown to 356 ambulances for a population of around 35 million. Moving Health has added a fleet of 31 tricycle ambulances across five districts, reaching more than 230,000 people across rural Ghana in areas not served by the National Ambulance Service.
The ambulances are kept at community-level clinics, contactable via a hotline or close enough for bike messengers to reach if necessary. Proximity is important when cell connection is unreliable.
They transport patients anywhere from 50 to 100 kilometers (31 to 62 miles) to larger district, regional or national hospitals for more complex care.
Isaac Quansah, Moving Health’s chief technology officer and country director, experienced the ambulance shortage firsthand after his wife gave birth to their first child.
Postnatal complications left her immobile, and Quansah — unable to find an ambulance — drove her to the hospital in a small car, which required her to sit up in excruciating pain.
“When I design an ambulance, I know that I have a reason,” he told CNN. “A life-fulfilling purpose for me to help other mothers not go through what my wife went through.”
Quansah oversees local manufacturing in Northern Ghana, where Moving Health employs and trains engineers.
Community-led upgrades
The vehicles are upgraded annually based on feedback from the community. After the initial design, health workers explained that it’s common for women to give birth midway through their journey to the hospital, sometimes at night.
Women expressed hesitancy to go to the hospital alone, so another seat was added, for a companion, and drivers revealed areas of the vehicle weakened from the rough roads, so the next model reenforced these and had shock absorbers.
“All year round, the ambulance keeps improving,” Quansah said.
Quansah oversaw design of the vehicle’s online-offline GPS system, designed to map the location of the ambulances even where connections are unreliable, offering centralized coordination, and tracking how long it takes to reach the hospital.
The ambulance tricycles cost around $7,000 as opposed to $75,000-$110,000, for a Basic Life Support Sprinter van ambulance. Current vehicles have been paid for by nonprofits and grants, but Moving Health hopes to make community-ownership accessible by developing a monthly payment system or a way for communities to split the cost with local government.
Rather than relying on ongoing external funding, each community with a tricycle ambulance has a locally managed Evergreen Fund, to cover fuel, drivers’ stipends and maintenance.
“Everybody contributes,” Quansah said. “During farming season people contribute food to be sold, to be added to it.” He says the community sees the ambulance as “not a luxury (but) a necessity.”
Beyond emergency dispatch, Moving Health ambulances were used to transport Covid-19 vaccines in 2020 and now also connect remote communities with prenatal and postnatal check-ups.
Blueprint for expansion
In early 2026, Moving Health wrapped up a yearlong “proof of concept” pilot with Ghana Health Services and Grand Challenges Canada, which funded a 10-ambulance fleet.
Last month it was featured by the United Nations alongside 60 projects globally in its Science, Technology & Innovation Solutions Book for 2026.
Moving Health has now attracted funding from several nonprofits and plans to scale the operation across the country.
“Our (first) goal is national coverage in Ghana,” said Young, “But we do think that it’s … able to be a blueprint for other countries in sub-Saharan Africa.”
The nonprofit also has plans for a centralized national dispatch hub for emergency transport, in collaboration with the National Ambulance Service.
“Moving Health, it saves a lot of lives…” said Rosemount, who is now pregnant, again. “We are happy and we appreciate, and we are praying for more to come in.”
“Can you imagine trying to (deliver a baby) with torch light in between your neck and your shoulder?” Quansah said. “So they requested for a light and we included it, so now we can even deliver babies.”
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Contact
Emily Young, CEO and Co-Founder, Moving Health