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This page introduces GOAL 3: who we are, the problem we work on, how IMPALA addresses it, and the principles and structure behind our work. If you are new to GOAL 3, start here.
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GOAL 3 is a Dutch social enterprise working to make healthcare fair and accessible for everyone. Founded in 2019 and named after Sustainable Development Goal 3, GOAL 3 develops IMPALA, a patient monitoring and management solution that helps health workers in under-resourced hospitals detect deterioration earlier and deliver proactive care. IMPALA combines durable bedside monitors, a central ward overview with clinical decision support, and a local service model covering training, maintenance and long-term support. Co-designed with health workers in Malawi and Rwanda, IMPALA is now used in more than 60 hospitals across six countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (as of October 2026), mainly in neonatal, paediatric and high-dependency wards. GOAL 3 works alongside the GOAL 3 Foundation, which raises philanthropic funding to bring IMPALA to high-need hospitals that cannot yet cover the full cost. GOAL 3 is based in 's-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands, with an office in Kigali, Rwanda, and local colleagues in Malawi, Tanzania and Kenya.
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In many low-resource hospitals, one of the biggest barriers to survival is not whether patients reach care, but whether their condition is recognised and acted on in time. Health workers are often responsible for too many patients at once, with limited equipment, fragmented information, and little support to continuously monitor who is stable, who is deteriorating, and who needs urgent attention. As a result, treatable complications are too often detected only when patients are already critically ill.
GOAL 3 exists to change this. We build IMPALA, a practical, fit-for-context technology that helps health workers deliver proactive, data-driven care in the places where it is needed most. Our solution IMPALA is not a standalone device, but an integrated care system designed to strengthen how hospitals monitor, prioritise, and respond to patients.
IMPALA brings together three essential elements:
Continuous patient monitoring
Durable bedside monitors capture vital signs and help detect early signs of clinical deterioration, even in busy wards with limited staff.
Clinical decision support and ward-level visibility
Software translates patient data into clear risk signals, alerts, and central ward overviews, helping health workers prioritise care and act before complications become life-threatening.
Implementation, training, and local service support
GOAL 3 works with hospitals, Ministries of Health, local teams, and implementation partners to embed IMPALA into daily clinical workflows, provide training and maintenance, and support long-term adoption.
Together, these elements help hospitals move from reactive care to proactive, data-driven care. For nurses and clinicians caring for many patients at once, IMPALA acts as an extra set of eyes: reducing the risk that a critically ill patient is missed and making it easier to focus attention where it is needed most. Additionally, IMPALA is designed specifically for low-resource hospital environments. It is built to work in settings with staff shortages, high patient volumes, unstable electricity, limited connectivity, heat, dust, and constrained maintenance capacity. This fit-for-context design is what we build for: a system that stays practical and usable where the need is greatest.
Early evidence is encouraging. Before-and-after studies in two Malawian hospitals found lower paediatric mortality and fewer critical illness events after IMPALA was introduced, and health workers reported spending less time on monitoring. Emerging neonatal data from Tanzania and Rwanda point in the same direction. Further studies are under way to strengthen this evidence (see IMPALA’s impact at a glance ).
GOAL 3 is not simply developing a patient monitor. We are building a new standard for quality care in low-resource hospitals: one where health workers have the tools, data, and support they need to detect deterioration earlier, act faster, and improve outcomes for the patients they serve. Our long-term ambition is to make proactive, high-quality hospital care accessible to every patient, regardless of where they are born or treated.
To date, IMPALA has been deployed across 60+ hospitals in six African countries, supporting the care of more than 247,500 patients and training over 2,145 health workers (as of October 2026). The solution is used primarily in neonatal, paediatric, and high-dependency wards serving some of the most vulnerable patients in resource-constrained settings.
Figure 1: What IMPALA looks like
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GOAL 3 was born from a simple but urgent observation: too many children continue to die from treatable conditions, not because health workers lack knowledge, commitment, or compassion, but because overstretched hospitals often detect clinical deterioration too late.
As a tropical doctor working in rural Tanzania, GOAL 3 founder Niek Versteegde witnessed this challenge firsthand. While helping to establish a neonatal intensive care unit, he saw how much difference timely monitoring and early intervention could make for newborn survival. At the same time, he also saw the reality facing many hospitals: too few health workers, limited equipment, intermittent manual monitoring, and patients whose signs of distress were often noticed only when they were already critically ill.
This contrast stayed with him. Niek became convinced that the same technological advances transforming everyday life could also transform healthcare, but only if they were designed specifically for the realities of low-resource settings. Rather than creating another donation-dependent project, GOAL 3 was founded as a social enterprise: an organisation built to attract investment, develop sustainable solutions, and reach millions of patients over time. The ambition was not only to introduce new technology, but to build systems that could last, scale, and continue creating impact long after implementation.
Together with medical product designer Bart Bierling, who had been developing innovative patient monitoring technologies based on research conducted at Philips, GOAL 3 began shaping a new approach to hospital care. Bart moved to Malawi and worked closely with health workers, caregivers, engineers, and researchers to co-design a solution that could withstand the realities of low-resource hospitals, from staff shortages and power outages to extreme temperatures, limited infrastructure, and constrained maintenance capacity.
Figure 2: Niek as a doctor in Tropical Medicine at a rural hospital in Tanzania around 12 years ago.
The result is IMPALA: a fit-for-context patient monitoring and decision-support system that helps hospitals move from reactive care to proactive, data-driven care. It was built around a belief that remains central to GOAL 3 today: where a child is born should not determine whether they survive, and every healthcare worker, regardless of setting, should have access to the tools needed to deliver high-quality care.
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All over the world, there are health workers fighting for their patients, even in the most challenging settings. These people are essential for giving patients the care they deserve and need. Therefore our mission is to empower and enable health workers at places where it is needed most.
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The right to health is universal. Every person should have access to healthcare. Therefore, it is unacceptable that billions of people cannot access care and every year millions die from treatable conditions. Fighting this injustice is what motivates us and what keeps us up at night. We believe in fair and accessible healthcare for everyone.
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By enabling data-driven decision making in health care we empower health workers to save lives, costs, and time. Our goal is to reduce paediatric and neonatal mortality in hospitals through a smart and easy to use monitoring system which enables early detection and treatment of critical illness.
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GOAL 3 does not simply deliver medical equipment. We work with health workers, hospitals, governments, and partners to build systems that can improve care, and keep working over time.
Our approach is built around six practical principles:
GOAL 3 works through a hybrid model: a social enterprise and a foundation working side by side. Together, they allow us to build a solution that is both sustainable and accessible (see figure 3).
This model allows GOAL 3 to avoid two common problems in global health innovation: technology that is too expensive to reach the places that need it most, and donated equipment that cannot be maintained over time. Instead, the social enterprise keeps improving and sustaining the IMPALA System, while the foundation helps bring it to underserved hospitals. Hospitals and governments contribute where possible, creating local ownership, while philanthropic funding helps close the gap where resources are limited.
Together, this creates a practical path to scale: IMPALA can continue to improve as a high-quality care system, while also reaching the patients and health workers who need it the most.
To learn more about the foundation, go GOAL 3 Foundation
Figure 3: Explanation of the differences between GOAL 3 Social Enterprise and GOAL 3 Foundation and the activities they work on together.
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In many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), hospitals do not have enough staff. WHO uses 4.45 doctors, nurses and midwives per 1,000 people as an indicative minimum for the health-related Sustainable Development Goals. A survey of 47 countries in the WHO African Region found an average of 1.55 per 1,000, about a third of that minimum. In Malawi, the figure was below 0.5, less than a ninth (Ahmat et al., 2022). Staff also often lack the equipment they need to monitor and manage their patients.
As a result, health workers are overwhelmed. They cannot monitor every patient closely, so deterioration is recognised late and treatment is delayed. Care becomes reactive: health workers respond to emergencies at a late stage, when treatment is more costly and time-consuming and outcomes are poorer. Scarce time and resources then go into late-stage rescue care, leaving even less capacity to act early. This is the vicious cycle of reactive care (Figure 4). Patient monitors designed for high-resource hospitals rarely break this cycle: they are expensive, need specialised maintenance and are not built for these conditions. The consequences are greatest for children. In 2024, sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 2.8 million of the 4.9 million deaths of children under five worldwide (UN IGME, 2025). Access to care alone does not prevent these deaths. In LMICs, an estimated 58% of deaths from conditions treatable by health care occur among people who did use the health system but received poor-quality care (Kruk et al., 2018).
These deaths are a symptom of under-resourced health systems caught in this cycle. It is driven by three interconnected challenges that IMPALA is designed to address: