• Friday, March 29, 2024
businessday logo

BusinessDay

How Nigerian female entrepreneurs are bridging healthcare gaps through innovation

Photos (1)

 Nigerian female entrepreneurs are increasingly bridging the gap in the country’s healthcare system through investment and innovation.

In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, access to good health care is a luxury many cannot afford. No wonder the country’s average life expectancy rate is one of the lowest in the world at 52.2 years.

Since 2001 when Nigeria alongside Heads of State of member countries of the African Union (AU), “Abuja Declaration” declared to commit at least 15 percent of their annual budgets to improving their health sector, Africa’s largest economy has not attained the pledged funding benchmark as the federal government has never voted more than six percent of its annual budget to the health sector.

The highest percentage since the declaration was in 2012 when 5.95 percent of the budget was allotted to health.

However, some women in the country are making great contributions to the Nigeria’s health sector, thereby demonstrating equal strength as their male counter parts in the industry.

One of such entrepreneurs is Awele Vivien Elumelu, chairperson of Avon Healthcare Limited and CEO of Avon Medical Services Limited.

Awele Vivien Elumelu

As her contribution to the sector, Elumelu is providing healthcare insurance to thousands of Nigerians across the country.

She is helping to bridge the gap in Nigeria’s health sector by addressing some of the many issues bedevilling the sector. She is using her resource to provide health services; by enabling access to health care delivery through insurance.

Today, Elumelu is also an African Ambassador for Gavi, the vaccine alliance driven by a public–private global health partnership committed to increasing access to immunisation in poor countries.

Elumelu stepped in pretty early; in the pre-seed of healthcare delivery, capital investment as well as her invaluable digital health expertise.

She looks to invest in simply to help provide affordable, quality healthcare to Nigerians and has also been committed to strengthening the relationship between health insurance agencies and healthcare providers.

“We need to be able to work together to deliver healthcare at the level that we would all like it to be,” Elumelu said.

Similarly, Ola Orekunrin Brown, chief executive officer (CEO), Flying Doctors Nigeria is bridging the gap in the healthcare sector through her one of a kind initiative.

Ola Orekunrin Brown
Ola Orekunrin Brown

 Flying Doctors Nigeria was founded by the medical doctor, helicopter pilot and the healthcare entrepreneur, after her younger sister died on a trip in Nigeria.

Today, the West Africa’s first air ambulance service has over 20 aircrafts, which has airlifted more than 500 air travellers.

In her remark, Brown mentioned that her health company looks for scalability and less capital intensive opportunities and is excited about providing urgent medical assistance in trauma and emergencies situations.

 “As healthcare advances, more can be done to treat patients that have what were previously disabling or life threatening conditions like burns, severe injuries or strokes. But, in order to provide complex healthcare safely, professional teams need to see sufficient volumes of patients with a particular condition,” Brown said.

She is building indigenous companies to take care of these needs in a hugely untapped market as well as solutions to access and affordability for underserved communities

“The potential benefits from specialisation are greater for some life threatening conditions like heart attacks and major injuries, but the safest treatments cannot be provided at small general hospitals because there are not enough patients for teams to maintain their skills. More lives can be saved if advanced services are centralised in more specialist hospitals,” she further said.

She added that the importance of focusing on from hospital determinants of health that lie upstream cannot be overstated as Health systems in Nigeria should focus on optimising resource allocation, reducing the disparity in healthy access and quality of health within the majority, rather than extending life for the minority.

 The push into Private-Public Partnerships (PPP) to improve the health and well-being of citizens is helping to shape Nigeria’s health sector.

 Njide Ndili, Country Director (Nigeria) at PharmAccess Foundation is creating impacts with digitalisation and collaborations.

Njide Ndili
Njide Ndili

PharmAccess is an international non-profit organisation with a digital agenda dedicated to connecting more people in sub-Saharan Africa to better healthcare, Ndili is Nigeria’s director.

Ndili, with a demonstrated history of working in the healthcare industry, skilled in health systems design and financing, Information technology, healthcare management, Business Process Improvement, Public  and Private sector advocacy and communication is deepening and strengthening healthcare service delivery in Nigeria.

 “In the context of the global push for UHC by 2030, the implementation of a digital platform for health insurance scheme’s operations is pivotal. Such a platform connects key stakeholders-the payers, patients and providers-and enables communication, data and money transfers,” Ndili said.

She is of the opinion that, to help build capacity in a structured system all stakeholders must, unite to make health care business a prerequisite.

Equally, Clare Omatseye, managing director/CEO at JNC International (JNCI), President Healthcare Federation of Nigeria-HFN is also advocating for States and Private-Public Partnerships to address challenges such as inadequate infrastructure, poor primary health facilities, malnutrition, poor health emergency response, brain drain in the health sector, to mention but a few.

Clare Omatseye
Clare Omatseye

She is an active advocate of affordable healthcare in Nigeria. Through her advocacy, she is improving collaboration among stakeholders in the healthcare.

 “Public private partnership is built on sustainability; it means collaboration with one another, committing to strategies that will increase visibility and deepen financing business of health penetration and not people dictating policy,” Omatseye said.

Omatseye is currently the vice president of the West Africa Healthcare Federation, founded in 2004, with the vision to make a difference in the medical infrastructure industry in Nigeria, through the delivery of innovative medical diagnostic and interventional technology solutions and after sales service.

 “We need to get our policies right, both public and private sectors together develop. There are different policies but we also found out that the biggest problem is implementation”, she said.

 However, it’s been widely researched that diverse teams perform better. Pamela Jackson-Ajayi, founder and managing director, Synlab Nigeria is also tapping into the healthcare innovation through technology expansion in medical devices and laboratory.

Pamela Jackson-Ajayi
Pamela Jackson-Ajayi

 Ajayi’s interest defines the road map for providing quality pathology services in Nigeria.

Through her dynamic leadership, Synlab Nigeria has created a national and regional footprint as a leading provider of pathology services in numerous states across Nigeria.

 “Nigeria needs more doctors to challenge us by using us and requesting for more of our specialised services to help manage their patients. Many still don’t know that all these tests are available here and that they can access their patients’ results anywhere they are in the country or even the world,” Ajayi said.

 She also suggested that that the government has a significant role to play in the process. “If it is not possible to provide this level of care in government institutions, then the government needs to enable the private sector to assist in delivering these services.”

‘The establishment of PPPs is a good start but a lot more needs to be done to reverse the brain drain and provide an enabling environment where healthcare institutions can flourish.”

 

ANTHONIA OBOKOH