“All women love you!” the communications employee shouts while saying goodbye. Not against me, but against Karlheinz Samenjo, a Cameroonian engineer who fights for cheap and humane care for women in Delft. His invention for pain relief during gynecological procedures is as simple as it is effective, but the medical industry is not yet in line and raising funds is difficult. “It is complex, but it has to work. Someone has to do it.”
Karlheinz Samenjo (36) sits in a laboratory in the Industrial Design Faculty of TU Delft, somewhere between an electric car, a row of airplane seats and other experimental setups. In the hall outside the lab, students drive around with robots, other groups sit at tables with glue guns, laptops and devices with all kinds of colored cables, wheels and lights sticking out. On Samenjo’s desk – black shirt, beard, long dreads together in an elastic band – are a duckbill, a plastic vagina and the invention he has been working on for the past eight years. has worked: the Chloe, a device for cheap and easy anesthesia during gynecological procedures.
Karlheinz Samenjo.
Photo Bart Maat
Samenjo’s Chloe is an incredibly simple polypropylene instrument made of two parts that together form an extension for a common 10-milliliter anesthetic syringe. You click it into the Chloe and it is then long enough to anesthetize the cervix. Doctors in the Netherlands normally do this with a long needle that is also used for epidurals, ‘spinal needles’. They are long enough, but fragile and pricey: about 50 euros each. The Chloe should cost one euro each, and they can be reusable several times. He has a contract with the university for certification, production and distribution crowdfunding set up.
In many sub-Saharan African countries, gynecological procedures, such as curettage after a miscarriage, are performed without anesthesia due to the costs involved. According to TU Delft, this concerns 25 million women every year. Samenjo has been trying to do something about this for years. And once he has succeeded, he wants to improve the rest of women’s care, including here in Europe: painful mammograms, uncomfortable duckbills (which his colleagues Tamara Hoveling and Ariadna Izcara Gual in Delft are also working on), heart conditions, menstrual pain, vaginal odors; his dream is a research center specifically designed for care for women – you understand that admiring exclamation from the communications officer.
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Screams from the hospital
How did he come to it? “I grew up in Bamenda, a remote, very poor town in Cameroon, with a hospital on the other side of my bedroom wall. I vividly remember the screams on the other side, especially from women. Of course I didn’t know what happened at the time, but it has always stayed with me. When I was able to go to college in Kenya with the help of a relative at the age of seventeen, I heard the same kind of screams coming from a hospital.”
He met a doctor who he befriended, who encouraged Samenjo, who was studying mechanical design, to invent something. “If you walk past a clinic, the women are queuing outside and you can hear the others inside screaming. That is not hidden in the community where I come from.”
He knew a bit about what medical equipment looked like. The hospital next to which he grew up dumped its waste on the field next to it, where he played as a boy. “Used needles were my toys. Dangerous of course, but you didn’t realize that as a child. My parents forbade it, but they were too busy to pay attention to it, and as a child it only became more fun to do it anyway. Moreover, we had nothing else to play with. Maybe that’s where I got my fascination for medical applications.”
And there is something else that drew him to this corner of medicine: his sisters. He grew up in a family of six, and spent a lot of time with the younger sister for whom he was the main caregiver. “My own sister went through a difficult birth and had problems, but no medication. I was not there but heard it on the phone. She called me and said: ‘pray for me, I can’t handle it anymore.’ That touched me, I wanted to solve that.”
Men who think they know everything
No, it was not very obvious for a man in Kenya to focus on women’s medicine. He laughs: “Not even in Europe, right? But I don’t think about it. I was in Nigeria last week and spoke to a woman who had undergone a mammography, with such a device that painfully squeezes the breast. She was in tears and asked: can’t you do something about that?” In such a case he does not see a ‘women’s problem’ or something with which he would have nothing to do. “I have seen so many painful things. I don’t think about the fact that I am a man, but simply: what is the solution?”
Of course it is sometimes uncomfortable, he admits, that as a man he gets so involved in problems that do not concern him. He is trained in sensitivity, sensing the temperature of the room, empathy. “Sometimes you’re right, but you still insult a room full of women because you’re a guy. But you know, it helps that I’m black.” He laughs, “really! Because you know, a white man who thinks he knows everything is the stereotype. And I’m not, so I often share common prejudices with women. Crazy, right? But that’s how it works.”
That is how centuries of oppression have an impact today, says Samenjo. The fact that he is also one of the oppressed helps in conversations with women. “When they see a white male doctor they think: you are the problem, even if it is not him. I have often experienced that a man says something about women’s care, and the women in a room do not accept it, even though he is right. I then try to take the sting out of such a conflict by repeating what he says, in a way that she accepts it.”
He ended up in Delft via Instagram. He saw a surgical device designed by a student in Delft, and they started talking. He came into contact with a professor through someone and was able to apply for a grant. His Chloe has now been clinically tested in Kenya, where he designed it. But doctors are increasingly asking him whether he can also use it in the Netherlands. “I thought, oops, I never thought of that. But it can work here too, people also want to reduce costs with humane, sustainable healthcare resources.”
The medical instruments that Samenjo developed: a training model, and two versions of the Chloe, a metal and polypropylene.
Photo Bart Maat
Lack of money
Those are the possibilities, but Samenjo also runs into walls. “There is very little money for specific women’s care, even in Europe. Just look here at TU Delft, how many projects aimed at women’s care do you know?” Even the new duckbill by Tamara Hoveling and Ariadna Izcara Gual was only available for 200,000 euros. “That is not nearly enough to put that instrument on the market. It is not popular. And that continues to surprise me, since half of the population is female. And when you talk to governments or companies, they say: well, anesthesia for women, things went well without it, right? There is no profit in that.”
A few hours before we spoke, Samenjo spoke with two companies to consider whether and how they could conduct a trial with the Chloe in the Netherlands. According to him, that would cost 400,000 euros. “Where will that money come from? And that is only for clinical tests, not even for further research.”
The current political situation in the world does not help. Donald Trump’s clampdown on USAID alone has caused him to miss out on several financial commitments. But Samenjo doesn’t get bitter quickly. “It is their government. They decide, so that is completely okay. That makes me look less at governments and more at foundations and other fundraisers that want to make an impact.”
“I have occasionally thought about giving up. It is much easier for me to do ‘deep tech’, or AI. I can earn a lot more money with it.” He laughs. “But somehow I can’t let the Chloe go. It’s hard, but I’ve worked too hard at it, so I’ll keep going and I’ll stay optimistic. Someone has to do it!”
Karlheinz Samenjo in his lab at TU Delft.
Photo Bart Maat
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