her tragic experience with jaundice as a new mother. In a major attempt to help avoid future women from experiencing the same terrifying circumstance, she came up with an innovative solution. She designed the handy and affordable solar-powered cribs to treat infant jaundice.
Tombra, Oboro’s newborn, was only 2 days old when he was admitted to the NICU due to a build-up of bilirubin, a substance that causes yellow skin and can result in irreparable damage or even death. Blue-light phototherapy is a very simple treatment that is widely practised in the developing nations.
As Virtue’s hospital lacked phototherapy equipment, Tombra was forced to undergo a dangerous emergency blood transfusion. Her kid would make a successful recovery, but the incident altered Virtue. The visual designer addressed the media saying, “I felt like some of the things I experienced could have been avoided. I thought, is there something I could do to make the pain less for the babies and the mothers?”
The handy, deployable phototherapy equipment is solar-powered and the cost is affordable, which is only one-sixth the price of a standard phototherapy crib, and is made in her native Nigeria. Virtue’s husband had previously worked with solar panels and offered a support to the graphic designer, who was navigating the unfamiliar areas of a new career. Throughout the design phase, she collaborated with a pediatrician to guarantee that every aspect benefited the small infants.
Crib A’Glow received a $50,000 award from Johnson & Johnson two years back as part of the Africa Innovation Challenge, and the Crib A’Glow is currently available in 500 hospitals throughout Nigeria and neighboring Ghana. Around 300,000 infants have already been benefited through the crib. Virtue has been honored with multiple awards for her invention. She also stated that an additional 200,000 newborns were saved from jaundice by distributing the cribs to remote areas. The special feature of a crib is that it requires no hospitals or electricity.
