In a well-lit office along Nairobi’s Ngong Road, Dr Alice Muhuhu leans back in her chair and slowly turns the pages of a childhood photo album. In some of the photographs, she is about eight years old, smiling shyly beside a swimming pool after joining Kenya’s national swimming team.
She later represented the country in triathlon competitions, remaining active in elite sport until her mid-teens.
One photograph captures her clutching a trophy after a triathlon competition, while another shows her proudly wearing Kenya’s national swimming colours. But her gaze lingers not so much on the medals as on what they represented: discipline, resilience and a refusal to be defined by limitations.
The lessons she learnt through sport, long before entering medical school or founding a health innovation venture, would later help her confront bigger challenges in Africa’s healthcare system.
Academically gifted, Muhuhu ranked among Kenya’s top students and developed an early affinity for the sciences.
“I always knew I had strong academic potential,” she recalls. “But I was also very big in sports. I used to do the two things together.”
As a young athlete, international competitions took her abroad, exposing her to stark inequalities between Kenyan competitors and their counterparts from wealthier countries. Athletes from Western nations often travelled with teams of support staff, including dieticians, physiotherapists, sports psychologists and specialised coaches. The Kenyan team, by contrast, frequently operated with far fewer resources.
“When the race starts, nobody feels sorry for the Kenyan team,” she says. “Nobody gives you a head start because your school doesn’t have a swimming pool or because you’re under-resourced. Sometimes your kit is not even there, and you’re having to go up against people in First World countries. You’re on the starting lineup and you must compete.”
Those experiences taught her to focus on performance, innovation and personal responsibility rather than viewing obstacles as excuses.
“It taught me not to carry a victim mentality,” she reflects. “You show up with your talent, your skills and with whatever resources you have. You do your best.”
Years later, that mindset would resurface in Kenya’s medical institutions and research laboratories.
Muhuhu pursued medicine, training in Kenya and abroad through scholarships and elective programmes in countries including Poland, Egypt, Grenada and South Africa. Along the way, she developed a growing interest in the intersection of medicine and engineering.
In late 2022, while at a leading teaching hospital in Poland, she encountered a healthcare environment equipped with advanced medical technology.
“I was overwhelmed by the amount of equipment available to doctors,” she says. “In Kenya, I might have my stethoscope and my knowledge. In Poland, I had tablets, digital systems and numerous technologies helping clinicians make decisions.”
Rather than becoming discouraged by the differences, Muhuhu began thinking about how Kenyan healthcare professionals could compete globally despite resource constraints. For her, the answer lay in innovation.
In 2023, she helped publish research on what became known as the first Kenyan-made, low-cost electrocardiogram (ECG) concept. The project was driven by the belief that cardiovascular care could be decentralised, making screening and diagnosis more accessible beyond major urban hospitals.
Cardiovascular disease is a major cause of death globally, yet access to diagnostic services remains a challenge in many African countries. In Kenya, limited access to specialised cardiac equipment and a concentration of cardiologists in major cities can make early diagnosis difficult, particularly for people living in underserved areas.
Muhuhu saw an opportunity to shift healthcare from reacting to illness to identifying problems earlier.
She founded MoyoECG, a portable heart-screening platform designed for settings with limited resources. The device records the heart’s electrical activity and is designed to identify more than 50 heart conditions. It allows frontline healthcare workers in rural clinics to screen patients and access diagnostic support, including in facilities with unreliable electricity or internet connectivity.
“We are a very reactive healthcare system,” she says. “I want to be on the proactive side of healthcare. The earlier people know about their condition, the better they can manage it or even prevent it altogether.”
Her work has earned her a place among two Kenyans selected from a shortlist of 16 innovators to compete for the 2026 Africa Prize for Engineering and Innovation, organised by the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering.
The other Kenyan entrant is Naomi Monari, whose innovation, Renal Roads, is a fully equipped mobile dialysis clinic.
For Muhuhu, the goal is to help reduce deaths from cardiovascular disease by making screening more accessible and enabling patients to receive attention before their conditions become severe.
She argues that late diagnosis contributes to poor outcomes in lower-income settings, where access to specialist care and diagnostic equipment remains limited.
“This is a Kenyan innovation,” she says. “Just like Mpesa, it was conceptualized here and also created for our market. We must be proud of our innovations.”
Today, Muhuhu continues to practise medicine while pursuing specialist training in cardiology. Through MoyoECG, she is working to bring screening and diagnostic support closer to communities that have traditionally faced barriers to specialised healthcare.
Her journey, from representing Kenya in competitive sport to developing medical technology, reflects a conviction that limited resources need not prevent local innovators from finding solutions to local challenges.