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UCL startup Nodanni: saving lives one necklace at a time
Startup Nodanni LTD, supported by UCL, has developed Vactraca, a necklace that’s helping to save children from vaccine-preventable diseases.
28 April 2025
Hundreds of thousands of children die every year in low-income countries simply because they haven’t had the right vaccines. This is often caused by paper records being lost or defaced.
UCL startup Nodanni has developed a new solution: a customised necklace that allows mothers to easily keep track of their children’s routine immunisation records.
“I was working at UNICEF in Nigeria and we kept seeing children missing life-saving vaccines, and dying from preventable diseases, because they had no digital health records,” explains Nodanni’s founder Victoria Ndoh (2019, MSc in Ethnographic Documentary Filmmaking).
Victoria set up her business after finishing her UCL master’s and tapping into entrepreneurship support from UCL Innovation & Enterprise.
Nodanni’s wearable vaccination tracker, Vactraca was designed with a team of industrial designers in the UK with input from immunisation specialists from Africa. Victoria was supported as part of UCL’s Hatchery incubator programme at BaseKX, UCL’s dedicated entrepreneurship hub. Here she had access to free tailored support and office space.
“It’s hard to put into words how valuable the help has been. For example, we needed advice on intellectual property law in China and a contact at the Hatchery immediately helped us with that. They also put us in touch with our industrial designers. So being part of the UCL community has helped us move forward with our vision much, much faster than we could have done on our own.”
Nodanni is now working with the government in South Sudan to pilot 2,000 Vactraca necklaces in refugee and displaced person camps. They’re also in talks with government agencies in Nigeria and Ethiopia. They've also pitched to organisations such as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), GAVI, the vaccine alliance, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) looking to work with them to roll out Vactraca more widely.
“Integrating Vactraca into existing interventions has an important role to play in vaccination tracking, and adopting it could help reduce the number of unvaccinated children - particularly in countries where many children still die from preventable diseases," explains Dr Charles Nwosisi, an experienced public health physician.
“Children shouldn’t be dying because they’re missing vaccines simply because of where they’re born,” adds Victoria. “We’re committed to getting this product out to as many countries as possible, so that every child can live a healthy and full life.”
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Photo © Victoria Ndoh