#FORBESAFRICA30Under30 Between 2003 and 2008, Joan Rukundo Nalubega says she spent more time in a sickbay than in a classroom. “Malaria was relentless. I was small, weak, and constantly recovering from fever. Other children believed I had HIV/AIDS and excluded me from games. For five years, not a single family member visited. During holidays, I was often the only child left at the orphanage where I grew up,” she explains. In the evenings, Nalubega would drag a mosquito net around with her and, at night, prop it up so it would not collapse on her face as she slept. “I was a child trying to engineer survival—that image of a small girl in a dimly lit orphanage room holding up a mosquito net with sticks is where Uganics was born… long before I had a name for it or a single dollar to build it.” In 2016, at the age of 19, after a close friend lost her child to malaria, Nalubega realized that too many children in her community were losing their lives to the disease. She started Uganics with no external funding, no inheritance, and no safety net—just $30 for transportation to conduct field research.