Boda Girls Founder Wins $100,000 Penn Nursing Award for Closing Kenya's Transport Gap in Maternal Care

The distance between a rural home in western Kenya and the nearest hospital is not measured only in kilometers. It is measured in cost, in time, in the availability of someone with a vehicle, and in whether a woman in labor at midnight can find any of those things simultaneously. Transportation is one of the least-discussed barriers in global maternal health, and the Boda Girls program was built specifically to address it.

Diane Dodge, executive director of Tiba Foundation and co-founder of the Boda Girls initiative, will receive the 2026 Penn Nursing Renfield Foundation Award for Global Women's Health - a $100,000 unrestricted grant from Penn Nursing presented biennially to recognize measurable impact in global women's health. The award ceremony takes place April 13, 2026, at the University of Pennsylvania's Perry World House.

What Boda Girls does and what it measured

The program trains women in rural Kenyan communities to become professional motorcycle taxi (boda boda) drivers and health advocates - two roles that were almost exclusively male before Boda Girls. The trained women provide free rides to hospitals for pregnant patients and women needing cancer screening, earning their income from other rides the rest of the time.

During the pilot phase, the program produced a 67% increase in hospital births and a 110% increase in maternal clinic attendance in the communities where it operated. The economic data are also notable: Boda Girls participants earn up to eight times their previous daily income after entering the motorcycle taxi industry.

"I am proud to celebrate the Boda Girls - the first women in their villages to learn to drive, advocate for health, and provide free rides to the hospital. They ensure that women give birth in hospitals and can access cancer care," Dodge said.

The logic of transport as a health intervention

Maternal mortality in sub-Saharan Africa is driven substantially by delays - in recognizing a complication, in deciding to seek care, and in reaching a facility capable of providing that care. The third delay, the transport delay, is often the most tractable: it is a logistics problem, not primarily a clinical one.

Models that address it directly - by putting more vehicles in communities and reducing the cost of accessing them - are among the most evidence-supported approaches to reducing maternal mortality in low-resource settings. The WHO's framework for safe motherhood identifies the three delays model as a central organizing concept. What Boda Girls adds to that framework is economic sustainability: by training participants to earn income as drivers, the model does not depend on external subsidy to maintain fleet capacity.

Dodge's broader portfolio in Kenya

Boda Girls is one component of Tiba Foundation's work. Dodge also co-founded the LREB Cervical and Breast Cancer Collaborative, which coordinates public health leaders across 14 Kenyan counties to improve cancer screening rates and HPV vaccination coverage. She developed the Nursing Promise Pathway, a career pipeline program designed to bring rural girls into the nursing profession - addressing both health workforce gaps and individual economic opportunity simultaneously.

The $100,000 Renfield Award will fund Tiba Foundation's plan to expand the Boda Girls model to ten counties and forty hospitals over five years, with a stated goal of providing one million health services. The expansion will also pilot electric motorcycles, integrating climate health considerations into the program's design.

About the Renfield Award

The Penn Nursing Renfield Foundation Award for Global Women's Health was established in 2012 by the Beatrice Renfield Foundation. Previous recipients include Denis Mukwege, founder of Panzi Hospital in the Democratic Republic of Congo (2016), and Edna Adan Ismail, founder of the Edna Adan Maternity Hospital in Somaliland (2014) - a list that reflects the award's focus on community-grounded rather than laboratory-based approaches to women's health.

Penn Nursing is the top NIH-funded nursing research institution in the United States and has been ranked the top nursing school in the country by QS University for ten consecutive years.