Noora Health Alumni

Mulago funds organizations for up to ten years. Each grant is a bet on the potential for impact exponential scale. When we buy that potential, we stay in; when we don’t, we get out. We refer to the organizations that have made it to ten years—and hence have timed out—as Mulago Alumni.  While we no longer have a continuous funding relationship with them, we remain engaged: They help teach our Fellows, we continue to keep tabs on and learn from their journeys, and occasionally we’ll fund specific experiments that speed scale or enhance scalability.

Our Journey with Noora

We met the present Co-CEOs, Shahid Alam and Edith Elliott, in 2013. Edith became a Mulago Fellow in 2014. Noora joined the portfolio in 2015, when they were early in R&D and had only a nascent organization. We were intrigued with Noora’s idea because we agreed that patients’ families represented a huge untapped resource for the delivery of  low-cost, effective care. Early results from work with the families of cardiac surgery patients in Bangalore were impressive, and in 20XX they made a shift to government health systems as the aspirational doer and payer at scale.    

During their time in our portfolio, Noora expanded their family caregiver model to include governments in several big states in India, a big swathe of Bangladesh, a national program in Indonesia, and most recently an expansion into Nepal where they partner with other NGOs to more rapidly achieve national coverage. In doing so, they successfully demonstrated that governments can be both doer and payer, and have accumulated a growing body of evidence across medical conditions.  By the end of our decade with them, Noora’s model had trained more than 65M caregivers and patients and that number continues to grow geometrically.

Noora was the first non-profit to be part of Y-Combinator. They won a Skoll award in 2022, and got Audascious funding that same year and again in 2025.  While we funded them, we were joined by a lot of other funders we respect, including Jasmine Social Investments, Rippleworks, and Cartier Philanthropy.

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