Why Unganisha exists
Kenya needs about 500,000 units of blood a year and collects roughly 175,000. Seven people need a transfusion every ten minutes. When a hospital runs short, the job of finding blood falls to the patient's family.
What families do today works often enough to keep doing: post the patient's name, their condition, the hospital and a personal phone number to Facebook and WhatsApp groups, and hope. It also puts a family's medical situation and a private number in front of an unbounded audience, permanently, where it cannot be taken back.
Unganisha is that same appeal without the exposure — the same reach, none of your family's details.
How it works
- Step 1
Someone posts a request
The hospital, the blood group, how many units and by when. We never ask for the patient's full name, their age or their diagnosis — none of it helps find a donor.
- Step 2
We alert nearby donors who can help
Only donors with a compatible type near that hospital, closest first, widening only if needed. The alert carries no personal information at all: a blood group, a facility, a distance.
- Step 3
A donor walks in and quotes a reference
In most cases no phone numbers change hands at any point. The donor gives the reference code at the transfusion unit and that is the whole exchange.
What Unganisha is not
We connect people. We do not collect, test, store, transport or sell blood, and we are not a blood bank. Every unit is collected, screened and issued by a licensed transfusion service — we only help the right donor hear that they are needed.
Blood in Kenya is free. Unganisha is free. If anyone asks you to pay for blood, for a donor, or for a place in a queue, they are not acting for us and you should refuse.
What we deliberately do not know
- We hold no test results of any kindNot your HIV status, not any other screening result. There is no field for them in our system, so there is nothing to leak and nothing to disclose.
- Your phone number is never shown to anyoneNot to hospitals, not to families, not to other donors. It is stored encrypted and used only to send you an alert.
- We never store where you actually liveYour location is rounded to roughly half a kilometre before it is saved, because we only ever need to know which requests are near you.
- You do not need to know your blood groupAbout four in ten Kenyans don't. You can register anyway and find out free when you next donate.
Where we are
Unganisha is new and still small. It is built and run in Kenya, and the data stays here. It is not a substitute for your hospital's own transfusion service — if you need blood now, ask the transfusion unit to contact the Kenya National Blood Transfusion Service directly as well.