Aid, Evolved

Throwback: David vs. Goliath with Mike Quinn of Zoona

Mike Quinn was co-founder and CEO of one Africa's earliest major financial technology (FinTech) companies, Zoona. He raised over 35 million dollars of international investment for this Zambian startup - before its heartbreaking crash and Mike's exit from the company.

 

In the conversation today, Mike shares how this Canadian engineer first came to Africa as a volunteer with Engineers Without Borders. Through early connections and personal initiative, he then found himself leading a Zambian mobile money company. In just a few years, Mike grew Zoona to a company that served millions of unbanked consumers in Zambia and Malawi. But that all changed when their Series C round of financing fell through at the last minute.

 

This is a classic David vs. Goliath story. Mike and his co-founders were a group of young, ambitious techies who wanted to make life easier for millions of Zambians. To do this, this small company needed to go head-to-head with billion-dollar international phone companies.

 

The craziest part? They almost won.

 

All of this and more is covered in Mike's book, Failing to Win, available worldwide through Amazon.

You can also access the show notes at https://AidEvolved.com or connect with us on Twitter @AidEvolved.

Femi Kuti of Reliance Health: Are You Fulfilling Your Mission?

Femi Kuti is the CEO and co-Founder of Reliance Health - an HMO using tech to make quality healthcare delightful, affordable, and accessible in emerging markets. Earlier this year they raised $40M through their Series B financing. This makes it the largest raise of its kind in the history of African health tech.

 

Despite this success, Femi is a humble down-to-earth man. He opened up with us on the podcast last month about growing up in Ondo City, Nigeria, the child of a physician and a teacher. Even though he trained as a physician and was working as an investment banker on Wall Street, he couldn't resist the allure of Lagos, the emerging Silicon Valley of Nigeria. So he set off on his own to start a digital health venture building telemedicine technology.

 

The remarkable moment in this story is a fateful conversation Femi had with a partner during his time at YCombinator, the most successful startup accelerator in the world. The partner asked Femi whether digital health alone could achieve the mission Femi had set out to achieve. If not, what would it take? The answer: a LOT. It would take an integrated healthcare system, an insurance program, financing, licensing, a fleet of modern clinics, and a host of third-party clinical partners. But if you never try, you'll never succeed. So Femi pivoted Reliance Health from a pure technology player to a complete HMO solution and integrated healthcare provider.

 

If you're a founder, idealist, dreamer, or changemaker, listen to this episode to remind yourself of the importance of fulfilling your own mission - and the power of big goals even when those goals feel impossibly hard.

 

To find out more, access the show notes at https://AidEvolved.com 

Let us know what you think of this episode on Twitter (@AidEvolved) or by email (hello@AidEvolved.com)

Yetunde Ayo-Oyalowo of Market Doctors: Taking Healthcare out of the Ivory Tower

Yetunde Ayo-Oyalowo founded Market Doctors based on the idea of bringing healthcare to people where they live and work. Market Doctors is a social enterprise that deploys doctors and other health workers outside of health institutions and in the public markets of Nigeria. Here they provide healthcare without disrupting the economic activities of communities living on the margins. Market Doctors is challenging assumptions about what healthcare is and where it can be found.

 

The idea was born when Yetunde was volunteering for her church to raise health awareness in the community. Trained as a doctor, she was able to counsel, diagnose, and treat people in public spaces outside of the traditional hospital setting. A born entrepreneur, she saw an opportunity in the markets where people are already congregating and looking for health advice - and where traditional medical institutions seemed too expensive, too distant, and too inaccessible. So, she pulled up a chair and got to work.

 

Yetunde is a doctor, an entrepreneur, a Nigerian, a woman, and a mother. When the international nonprofit community wasn't initially receptive to her idea, she went a different route. She turned to faith-based organizations and corporate partners for support. She forged partnerships with banks, pharmaceuticals, and other large corporations to leverage their funds to serve community needs. Today Market Doctors employs 50 people serving 9 states in Nigeria.

 

To find out more, access the show notes at https://AidEvolved.com 

 

Let us know what you think of this episode on Twitter (@AidEvolved) or by email (hello@AidEvolved.com)

Chrispinus Onyancha of clinicPesa: How to Lift Yourself Up in Business

Chrispinus Onyancha is the Founder and CEO of clinicPesa. clinicPesa is a FinTech company that provides affordable healthcare financing to the uninsured in Africa through mobile money.

This is the story of Eng. Onyancha Chrispinus the Founder and CEO of clinicPesa. It's the story of how he was able to rise, first to the top of his class and then to secure a prestigious MIT fellowship. Finally Chrispinus struck out on his own to create an internationally-funded digital health business, clinicPesa.

Today clinicPesa serves over 1,870 Hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies across Uganda. It provides a variety of products focused on health savings and loans. In less than 4 months, they were able to reach 250,000 Ugandans, and they are now looking to grow to 1.4 million customers by close of year. These products are built on mobile money and other cellular technology to make the act of savings and payments friction-less for people and providers alike - with or without an internet connection. Where gaps exist, clinicPesa also provides short-term medical loans. This year, they are expanding their offerings to include new product lines in the pharmacy supply chain.

To find out more, access the show notes at https://AidEvolved.com 

Let us know what you think of this episode on Twitter (@AidEvolved) or by email (hello@AidEvolved.com)

Alloysius Attah of Farmerline: Go Big or Go Home

Today, April 26 2022, Farmerline announced that it has raise $6.4 million in Pre-Series A investment and an additional $6.5 million in debt. Farmerline is an AgriTech business known as "the Amazon for farmers in Africa." We recently sat down with Alloysius Attah, founder and CEO of Farmerline, to hear the remarkable story of Farmerline.  

Starting from his humble beginnings growing up in a farming community in Ghana, Alloysius met his co-founder Emmanuel Addai in a dorm room at university. Together they rode the early hype around SMS messaging to deliver market prices to farmers - and quickly realized that farmers in Ghana need much more than just text messages. For the decade to follow, Alloysius has tirelessly pursued the elusive mission of creating real value for smallholder farmers. In the first iteration, they brought information and insights directly to farmers through voice messages. In the second iteration, they empowered agricultural extension workers to streamline trainings; provide quality seed and fertilizer; and even offer financing.

Then, in 2020, Farmerline made a pivotal strategic shift. In a key moment of crisis created by the COVID-19 epidemic, 2020 was truly a "make it or break it" year. Through an extraordinary push from Alloysius and his team, Farmerline catapulted from its roots in Ghana towards the global stage. Today it provides the technology platform used by organizations in 26 countries to streamline the agricultural value chain, serving over a million farmers in Africa.

To find out more, access the show notes at https://AidEvolved.com 

Let us know what you think of this episode on Twitter (@AidEvolved) or by email (hello@AidEvolved.com)

Nthenya Mule of Antara Health: Making Healthcare Personal in Kenya

Nthenya Mule is one of the founders of Antara Health, a technology company reimagining primary care to serve Kenyans both at home and in the clinic.

 

Born and raised in Kenya, Nthenya recounts first-hand the many ways in which the healthcare system failed her family. Hoping to make a difference, she shares how she explored new healthcare offerings in microinsurance, development financing, and private equity. Yet through a chance turn of events she met her co-founder Kebba Jobarteh and decided to try something radically different. Starting from the seed of an idea, Nthenya shares the tactics she used to develop the first win-win partnerships necessary for Antara to scale.

 

With the growing demand for healthcare that can be delivered remotely, Antara provides the end-to-end platform needed to deliver a new kind of healthcare. This includes the technology to connect all the actors; a virtual care team; and a model that seamlessly connects with traditional health financing and care providers. 

 

This conversation is for anyone who sees how much healthcare demands have changed since 2020 and the opportunity this presents to better serve the bottom of the pyramid.

 

To find out more, access the show notes at https://AidEvolved.com 

Let us know what you think of this episode on Twitter (@AidEvolved) or by email (hello@AidEvolved.com)

Ben Bellows of Nivi: Getting the Market Incentives Right

Ben Bellows spent almost 20 years studying the economics of aid systems - but 2 years ago Ben quit his day job to go all-in on Nivi. Nivi is a chatbot marketplace Ben founded to empower, inform, and engage communities directly. Today we chat with Ben to understand what inspired someone with 50 peer-reviewed manuscripts and a lifetime in the nonprofit sector to take a bet on a healthtech startup.

Ben grapples with the hopes and failures of designing a better kind of aid, one that rewards outcomes rather than inefficiencies. He talks about the unique moment in history when broadband arrived at his home in Kenya and you could feel the energy and optimism that kickstarted the Silicon Savannah. Embracing this moment, Ben clicked with one of his two co-founders within an hour of their encounter at Java House in Nairobi. All of this brings him today to Nivi, a social enterprise providing a chatbot-based marketplace allowing over 2 million people to achieve their own health goals in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, and India.

To find out more, access the show notes at https://AidEvolved.com 

Let us know what you think of this episode on Twitter (@AidEvolved) or by email (hello@AidEvolved.com)

Healthcare Financing for the Next Billion with Ikpeme Neto of WellaHealth (Nigeria)

Ikpeme Neto is the CEO and Founder of WellaHealth in Nigeria. He's carried this healthtech startup through a major pivot from pharmacy automation to low-cost, tech-enabled health financing. In today's conversation, Ikpeme shares the many entrepreneurial experiments he ran in his early career - before he decided to scrap his entire team and start afresh. He recalls the moment when he decided to risk it all by giving up a comfortable life in New Zealand to come home to Nigeria and make a bet on a new startup. Finally he shares what he learned, and how he learned it, about the market for healthcare in Nigeria, and the role technology can play to bring healthcare financing to the next billion.

 

WellaHealth is an early-stage tech startup that lowers the barriers to access affordable micro-insurance health products. In 2021, WellaHealth successfully raised a seed round of investment, supported 1,500 pharmacies, served over 40,000 people, and grew revenue by 10X compared to the previous year.

 

To find out more, access the show notes at https://AidEvolved.com 

Let us know what you think of this episode on Twitter (@AidEvolved) or by email (hello@AidEvolved.com)

Achieving Financial Sustainability in Open Source with Yaw Anokwa of ODK

In November of 2020, I sat down with Yaw Anokwa, founder and CEO of ODK, to talk about the unsustainability of open-source software in global development. Despite building a data collection platform that was used by countless organizations in every country in the world, Yaw's team struggled to find the financial resources necessary to keep ODK going.

Today, ODK is celebrating a huge milestone: in a single year, Yaw has transformed the organization, rebuilt their revenue model, and achieved financial sustainability. We catch up with Yaw to talk about the many different business models ODK tried which failed to take off...and the one that finally made it.

ODK helps social impact organizations build powerful offline forms to collect the data they need wherever it is. It    is used for everything from COVID-19 contact tracing in Somalia, to monitoring parliamentary elections in Albania, to managing school attendance across Honduras.

To find out more, access the show notes at https://AidEvolved.com 

Let us know what you think of this episode on Twitter (@AidEvolved) or by email (hello@AidEvolved.com)

 

Seeking Knowledge from Chaos with Tigest Tamrat of WHO

When it comes to health, there are few people who are tasked with answering the Big Questions: what's actually working? Where is the evidence? And how do we get it to scale? Today we talk with Tigest Tamrat, a technical officer at the World Health Organization (WHO), whose job it is to find answers to incredibly hard, ambiguous questions. She's co-authored some of the most essential reading in digital health - including the WHO's Recommendations on Digital Interventions for Health Systems Strengthening, as well as the mHealth Assessment and Planning for Scale Toolkit (MAPS).

 

Tigest gives us a window into the stakeholders, the tensions, and the worries that go on behind the scenes, when you're working on health policy at a global scale. In the second half of the episode, we learn how Tigest stumbled into her work with WHO. Lastly, she shares her hopes for Ethiopia, the country where she was born, and how social enterprises can help Ethiopians lift themselves up.

 

To find out more, access the show notes at https://AidEvolved.com 

Let us know what you think of this episode on Twitter (@AidEvolved) or by email (hello@AidEvolved.com)