Prosthetics Startup Amparo wins FT & IFC award in innovating for disability

Amparo, one of our AT2030 partners, received the Special Award for Innovating for Disability yesterday evening, at the 2019 Financial Times and IFC’s Transformational Business Awards. A group of 9 judges chose the winners from a diverse selection of 270 businesses from all over the world.

The GDI Hub, as a part of the UK Aid funded AT2030 programme has partnered with Amparo to support them in carrying out a clinical trial to evaluate how the Amparo Confidence Socket could help improve the provision of lower limb prosthetics in Kenya.

During Amparo and GDI Hub’s collaboration with local Kenyan partners, research will be carried. During the trial, the objective is to understand how the local services could absorb this technology and develop scalability models to maximise the impact of the Confidence Socket and ensure that more people can access the prosthetic services that they need.

Judge Darren Welch, Director of Policy UK at DFID presented the award, calling it: “A solution that has a huge potential to deliver real impact for people with disabilities, particularly in remote areas, with the minimum waste and at an affordable cost”.

Amparo’s groundbreaking prosthetic technology, the Confidence Socket, enables medical professionals for the very first time to visit and treat amputees anywhere with electricity and have them take their first steps in just one sitting. On top of this, the Confidence Socket can be completely reshaped to accommodate volume changes in the residual limb of an amputee; an eventuality that typically requires a new prosthesis.This makes it a unique innovation in the provision of assistive technologies in developing countries.

Since launching in 2018, Amparo works with over 100 orthopaedic clinics and professionals all over the world and have already changed the lives of hundreds of amputees. In July of this year, Amparo, together with the Global Disability Innovation Hub, will take the next step in their mission to provide access to modern prosthetics to all, travelling to Kenya to train medical professionals and treat amputees in the most remote of areas as part of the £10m global programme AT2030

CEO and founder of Amparo, Lucas Paes de Melo: “We are extremely proud of the achievements we have made but there is still a long way to go. 90% of the world's amputees have no access to prosthetic care. Our trip to Kenya this year will be the first major step in changing that statistic for the better, allowing all those amazing people to live their lives to the fullest.

More on our work with Amparo.