Many innovators at the SnakeHack had exciting and ambitious ideas, from utilising mobile applications and drone technology to leveraging new digital technologies to tackle complex challenges for patients and clinicians. Digital technologies hold huge potential for improving referral networks, driving last-mile delivery systems and optimising healthcare management. The tools have their place in accelerating people’s access to appropriate care, but experts urged innovators to remember that innovation extends far beyond purely digital solutions.

Innovation encompasses social, service-delivery, behavioural, and system-level change. Practical non-digital approaches are just as vital to saving lives, such as establishing collaborative referral networks with traditional healers or community experts, setting up cost-sharing models to ensure everyone can reach care when needed, or building social partnerships with local transport links to move patients.

Experts urge innovators to consider how knowledge moves in remote areas, and to reconsider the chosen solution type in their challenge area of focus. Consider how knowledge truly moves in remote areas. Put yourself in the shoes of someone experiencing a crisis—is a tech-heavy app really the most effective or accessible response? While technology is appropriate for certain regions and contexts, you should ensure your solution is designed around your end users and their existing infrastructure. We encourage you to explore the full spectrum of innovation, whether digital, physical, logistical, or social, and choose the medium that best fits local realities.

• Will your solution actually function in a remote or low-resource environment?

• Is your chosen technology the most accessible route for the end user?

• Have you considered whether a digital, social, logistical, or systems-based solution may be more practical for your target users?

When developing solutions, innovators should consider whether they cause an additional burden for healthcare workers. Community health workers and rural clinicians are already operating at capacity. Any solution that requires extensive manual data entry, complex extra reporting, or intricate workflows risks being abandoned or rejected by health authorities.

Innovators should consider their solution from a governance perspective to ensure suitability for ministries of health. For a solution to be implemented, it must be accepted and absorbed by governments and local ministries. Keep processes lean and user-friendly. Solutions would work best when they integrate seamlessly into local health architecture rather than creating an isolated, heavy process.

We recognise that understanding how healthcare workers operate and treat snakebites takes years of experience, and teams will not have all the answers by the entry deadline. Your project plan can show how you will build user engagement, testing and co-validation as you continue to develop your solutions.

• How can your solution be designed to support healthcare workers?

• How will you incorporate ongoing user testing to ensure it works for them?

It was admirable that many teams at the SnakeHack attempted to tackle the entire snakebite patient pathway at once, developing comprehensive concepts that spanned community education to antivenom logistics, clinical diagnosis, and financial support.

However, many high-burden areas have multiple points of failure at multiple points, and attempting to fix every challenge is virtually impossible. Mentors urged innovators to look at challenges at the ground level and sharpen their solution's focus. It may be that your primary innovation focuses on a single friction point, whether that is community-level recognition of envenomation and encouraging an individual to seek care, or establishing antivenom cost-sharing funds for groups at a higher risk of being bitten by a snake, encouraging junior doctors to conduct additional training to respond to snakebites, or transporting blood and oxygen where it is needed most.

Solutions that clearly identify a specific challenge and have a robust opportunity to strengthen community responses, accelerating access to appropriate care, or improving the delivery of treatment are likely to be more impactful than solutions that attempt to solve everything at once.

• Is your solution specific or are you trying to fix five complex problems at once?

Countries, health systems, and communities across high-burden regions operate at very different levels. A solution that works seamlessly in one healthcare system will not automatically succeed in another unless it is adapted to local infrastructure, governance structures, and cultural realities. Experts at the SnakeHack emphasised the critical importance of researching specific target regions and population groups and using co-design methods to ensure interventions fit their daily realities.

Experts encourage innovators to research a specific area or groups, and consider co-design methods to understand the existing infrastructure and perspectives of the specific target location.

Understanding all the complexities of a specific geographic area or end user requires extensive work and co-design planning. We encourage them to build local engagement, user testing, and co-design activities directly into their ongoing project proposals and future development roadmaps. Finalist teams will be supported with a package of support to build connections and learn from local experts as they develop their solutions.

• Have you considered tailored messaging or logistical solutions for specific groups like agricultural workers, school-aged children, refugees, or pregnant women?

• Does your project plan outline how you will incorporate local co-design and user validation into your future development activities?

One of the most inspiring outcomes of the Sub-Saharan Africa SnakeHack was seeing participants embrace open collaboration, seeking out new partners to bridge expertise gaps and strengthen their ideas.

As you refine your entry, don't try to build your solution alone. We encourage all innovators to remain open to new partnerships, cross-disciplinary input, and collaborative models. Take advantage of the Innovator Portal to connect with mentors and find team members.

You can also register to join our team for the entrant support session to ask questions about eligibility, judging criteria, track selection, and what to expect as a finalist.