These social entrepreneurs are advancing health equity in Sub-Saharan Africa

The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed innovation and adoption of digital technologies in African countries, resulting in many thriving tech start-ups. At the same time, the pandemic amplified existing barriers across the continent, such as supply chain disruption and logistical challenges, and these received the lion’s share of attention from international and local ecosystem actors.

Social entrepreneurs – bolstered by supportive enabling environments – were able to take that opportunity, and used it to leapfrog their solutions, specifically in scaling digital technologies. This is one of the main three findings highlighted in a newly released report, Inclusive Health Systems: Innovations towards Health Equity in Africa, which offers a roadmap for all actors and stakeholders working in the health ecosystem in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The mobile application Whispa was developed by social entrepreneur Morenike Fajemisin and her team. They have developed the first mobile application in Nigeria that offers young people (mostly women), quality sexual health education, private or anonymous telemedicine consultations, balanced contraceptive counselling and an affordable means to book contraceptive appointments, among other things.

Whispa Health is just one out of many successful innovations identified in the report. But despite these hopeful examples, many other solutions remain underutilized at scale. This is in part due to the lack of an enabling environment that could be created by common efforts from public and private sector partners.

“When I was five years old, I had a cousin who got pregnant when she was 18. As a result, she was unable to continue her education. This event had a way of changing the entire trajectory of a young woman’s life. And she is far from the only one in Nigeria. In 2019, my country counted 2.7 billion abortions. If she and other girls her age had been given access to birth control, this number would not be that high. My cousin’s story motivated me to create Whispa,” Morenike Fajemisin explains.

The Nigerian serial entrepreneur Abimbola Adebakin and her team used the existing enabling environment to address challenges in supply chain logistics and access to medicines at the same time. She created the medicines ordering platform myMedicines and managed to significantly increase access to medicines for customers all across Nigeria, even in the remotest of villages.

Through its platform, myMedicines, brings together licensed pharmacies across almost all states in Nigeria with those in need of high-quality, affordable medicines crowdsourced from pharmacies nationwide. Not only does the platform help solve access and ease of purchase for users, it is also ensuring the safety of drugs purchased. Without an enabling environment, myMedicines would not have been able to operate at scale in Nigeria.

“We started with a partnership with the courier arm Nigerian Postal Service (NIPOST) which is the main entity that extensively covers the country with its 5,000 workforce and its 1,000 offices spread across the country. This has enabled myMedicines to deliver drugs and pharmaceuticals to customers across the country. Now we partner with other logistics partners and we currently do an in-house trial to see how we can increase the efficiency of the doorstep delivery even further,” Abimbola Adebakin explains.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the enabling environment for scaling transportation and digital solutions grew exponentially. The Government of Ghana for example established the Coronavirus Supply Chain and Trade Disruption Team to mitigate the pandemic’s impact on Ghanaian businesses, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). They managed to urgently mobilise teams who assisted in addressing specific supply chain issues and challenges affecting these businesses. But despite these efforts, other innovations, often community based, were not scaled.

One reason for this lack of scale can be found in the scarcity of efficient support systems (including mentorship, community building and funding mechanisms) for social entrepreneurs, preventing them from growing and building resilience. Silulo Ulutho Technologies in South Africa for example has created a support system for entrepreneurs in remote and underserved communities by offering them a one-stop business and career centre to uplift and upskill members of these communities.

Solutions such as Silulo are mostly used to address economic impacts of crises and to a lesser extent, the barriers of digitization and data accessibility. Social entrepreneurs and innovators focussing on developing solutions addressing healthcare capacity, gender equality, and access to basic needs can benefit from utlizing the structural support system represented by organizations like this.

Systemic shocks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, tend to expose existing societal weaknesses. Through job losses, broken social security systems, interrupted education and schooling, compromised food security, and increased gender-based violence, the pandemic has worsened broad health inequities. These shocks have highlighted both the material risk health inequities pose to businesses’ overall performance and long-term sustainability, as well as the need for businesses and radical collaboration initiatives to play a key role in addressing such inequities.

Through initiatives like the Global Health Equity Network and its Zero Health Gaps Pledge, business leaders are demonstrating their commitment to playing their part in advancing global health equity. Partnering with and supporting social innovators – who have led the way in developing scalable solutions that sustainably address local needs and priorities – provides an actionable pathway for businesses to follow through on these commitments.

By accepting that health equity is a societal goal, there needs to be a recognition that these social factors do not stand outside the health sector. In fact, they are integral to developing fairer social systems.