Nathan's Impact in Tanzania: Volunteering at a Maternity Hospital

Nathan Spencer joined Humanitix in 2024 while still studying at university. He mentioned to our co-founder Josh that he wanted to volunteer in Africa with two of his close friends over the summer break. A lightbulb went on in Josh’s head - and he connected Nathan with Barbara May Foundation, the recipient of Josh’s staff giving choice last year, who were in desperate need of IT Support to make their hospitals that much more efficient.

Barbara May Foundation provides lifesaving maternal healthcare & fistula repair in remote Africa. Its primary focus is safer childbirth, the delivery of live babies, and mothers not dying or injured during childbirth. Eradicated in the first world in the late 1800’s, an obstetric fistula is a severe injury that can occur to a woman in childbirth caused by an obstructed labour. In the developed world, the injury would be prevented by a caesarean section. This intervention is often unavailable to many women in remote and poor regions and they can labour for up to 10 days causing terrible injury, usually a stillborn child, and in the worst cases, death. Often women go untreated for years, suffering ongoing pain, degradation and isolation.

The CEO of Kivulini Maternity Centre Monica Ndege with a patient and her baby

It just so happened that the Kivulini Hospital Maternity Africa in Tanzania were in need of software support - so off Nathan and his friends went on an adventure of a lifetime for this worthwhile cause. We asked Nathan to share with us some stories and reflections from his time abroad.

Nathan and his friends on their first Zoom call with Barbara May Foundation

My experience volunteering in Tanzania

I was fortunate to have the experience of working at a maternity hospital in Tanzania for two months at the start of 2025.

My most striking memory upon arriving was the emphasis on music. At the start of the morning shift and night shift, there were these beautiful songs that everyone would sing together, dancing joyfully and praising God. Here’s a little excerpt.

This was also underscored by the cry of newborn babies. The hospital had a whiteboard, called the Tree of Life, with the number of all the babies delivered each month. It was quite humbling to work at a place helping deliver so many babies and bringing new life into the world.

In the time I was there, around 600 babies were born. This little hospital probably had the output of some of the biggest hospitals in Sydney!

What was quite confronting was the fact that there was also a crematorium at the back of the hospital. I spent a lot of time helping staff in the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) and seeing babies struggling to breathe. There were stories of women who had arrived at the hospital hours later than they should have, often resulting in stillbirths. It kind of shook me to think that if they had the resources we had in Australia, maybe more of them would make it through.

How we helped the hospital

Our main goal was to set the hospital up with a new system to record patient information. At the start we had meetings with all of the hospital staff about fixing their outdated existing system. The main challenges were:

• They couldn’t search for patients

• The software was designed with billing information - but this hospital was for free since it was serving the poor so it wasn’t fit for purpose

• There were lots of unnecessary fields in the medical system.

They handed us every single paper form they had in the hospital, which was a lot! Our stack of forms to digitise was as thick as a textbook. We found an open source software platform online which fixed these problems. What was challenging was the incredibly low internet speeds, of lower than 100kb per second. We had to use USB sticks and be very careful with our internet usage - it was almost like we went back in time to the early 2000s.

The migration to the new system also had some surprising challenges. As part of the migration we set everyone up with a new password, which defaulted to including a capital letter. It turned out that many staff struggled with using the ‘Shift’ key, so we had to spend a lot of time teaching everyone about typing capital letters on the keyboard.

Reflections from my experience

It was quite humbling to see how much the staff there respected us. In Australia, straight out of university, we are (rightfully) treated as still very young and supervised closely. In Tanzania, we were treated as full-fledged adults and had to make decisions over what to prioritise and what we could fix for them. I later found out that the median age in Tanzania is 17 - being in our early twenties, we were already quite old compared to this!

Despite the sobering truths and the real struggles of people in Tanzania, my key takeaway from my time there was actually a feeling of lightness. The people we met there were very happy with very little, and I feel less attached to material things having lived there for so long. There is so much more that matters in life, and my experience made me realise how we can falsely value and place importance on material things that don’t matter so much in the end.