NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

In Rwanda, many women face obstacles to accessing necessary health and hygiene products, like pregnancy tests and birth control. For some, they’re just not available where they live. For others, lingering stigma and shame around sexuality make venturing out to buy them in public a daunting proposition.

Kasha, a new mobile e-commerce startup, wants to make it easier for women to access these items quickly and confidentially. Founded in 2015 by Joanna Bichsel and Amanda Arch, two former Microsoft employees who moved to Rwanda after connecting over a mutual frustration that the life-saving technological innovations they’d seen unfold under their noses in the Seattle tech scene were not reaching the developing world. They built Kasha as a for-profit social enterprise that capitalizes on the mobile ordering and e-commerce trends now taken for granted in the developing world.

Image credit: Kasha.