Host: Romily Broad, Tech For Good
Guest: Nikita Kuzmin, Founder, Helpster
In 2021, serial tech entrepreneur Nikita Kuzmin decided it was time to give something back to the world that had given him so much.
His idea was a simple one: Build a charitable organisation and app that could connect an individual in genuine need of urgent help with someone elsewhere in the world willing to donate to provide it.
The obvious first target was in healthcare. Around the world, millions of people – especially children – go without simple treatments for serious but easily curable conditions for want relatively small amounts of money to pay for them.
What if an app existed where a patient’s doctors could easily connect with someone in the world willing to pay for a course of antibiotics, anti-malarial drugs, or a simple procedure? Someone with the means and the will to pay the small amount to save a life?
As Nikita says in this episode of the Tech For Good podcast: “In this world, there should not be people who die because they don’t have $300 in their pocket.”
But what seemed like a simple idea soon became a Herculean effort to establish both trust and the banking facilities to enable it to take shape.
Four years later, with bases now established in the USA and Estonia and now operating in multiple counties in Africa and Asia, Helpster is on the verge of realising its promise. More than 700 children’s lives have already been saved, and the goal is exponential.
“We are doing it all. Nobody is going to stop us.”
Visit the Helpster website.
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