Sprout E-course Alumnus Story: Ramses Lozano

How do you save a life? Sometimes, with an app. A 21-year-old computer technology engineer has found a way to save countless lives using nothing more than a simple phone app and his own ingenuity.

Solidariza-T is a points-based rewards system to encourage blood donation, providing donors with discounts in restaurants, bookstores, cafes, and cinemas. The project’s goal is to raise the blood donation index in cultures where there are fears or taboos around giving blood. It is launching first in Morelos, Mexico, where its founder, Ramses Lozano Rueda, is from.

The need for blood is far greater than the rate of donation; in fact, hundreds of people die every day waiting for blood transfusions. In Mexico, only 3% of the population donate blood (and 97% of that is their own medical necessity). Lozano Ruedes’ team is seeking to change that, and ultimately foster a culture of blood donation in Mexico.

“It all started with a real situation when a family friend was going to go through surgery and she needed a blood donor. It was really complicated to find them. The idea came out of that moment, why don’t we do a project to try and help the blood banks to get the resources to get the blood donations?”

Lozano Ruedes developed the project with a team for Microsoft’s Imagine Cup competition, and used resources and information gathered though their involvement in Microsoft YouthSpark.

A model has been completed and the app will be ready to launch at the end of the year. The team first recruited businesses to donate rewards points by asking family and friends who owned their own companies. They were then able to leverage their success to recruit other businesses. Funding for beta testing and launch were raised through fund raising events and crowdfunding. as well as through a seed funding competition through Sprout.

They have partnered with the Blood Transfusion Centre in Morelos and are now approaching the Red Cross and other organizations together with the help of the government Health Secretary, a key partnership.

“It was hard to establish that relationship but it was all possible because of all the work I did beforehand, which involved the Sprout e-course. The web page I developed for the course and having all that worked organized in a formal way was so important. We already had a model of the project and a strong idea of the business model but the Sprout e-course made me realize that it was not as strong as we thought -- and that we found we could improve a lot of things. It pushed me forward and helped me present my project to my partners and important people.”

Lozano Ruedes also credits his mentor at Microsoft and the YouthSpark event he attended for helping him to build a community of other social innovators that have given his team the essential creative support and feedback essential for making the project a reality.

“My expectation of the [Microsoft YouthSpark] event was a lot different than what actually took place. I expected there to be a lot of talks and that type of thing. But when I realized we were all there, as people of Latin America, to propose ideas and actually trying to develop them into real projects, that was actually one of the greatest experiences I have ever had.”

The Solidariza-T team wants ultimately expand the project throughout Mexico, where patients are often turned away from surgeries at public hospitals if they are unable to provide their own donors. “When you have this kind of problem, sometimes you have to buy blood, or find another inhumane way of getting the blood,” Lozano Ruedes explains. Once the project is up and running, the team will follow up on its success with blood banks and patients, and use this data to market Solidariza-T to more businesses and regions.

What is Lozano Ruedes’ timeline for expanding throughout Mexico? Given the need and the reproducibility of the app, it will be “as fast as we can.”