Women in health tech strive to bridge gap

They have been there and it’s no wordplay. They hold a rare grip of a thriving career in a terrain that typically narrows when the roll call is for women.

These women are combining a grounded knowledge of health sciences with digital technology to provide real-world solutions to healthcare access and understanding of diseases origins.

They have tasted what it means to be one of few women in a room of key decision-makers and realised that the gender imbalance in a world that has rapidly evolved into a digital order is unsatisfactory.

At least for Abimbola Adebakin, founder and chief executive of Advantage Health Africa, coordinating over $1 million healthcare logistics organisation that delivers medicines from pharmacy shelves to individual homes has revealed that funding is available for health startups leveraging digital technology.

The challenge: the funds chase just a few, typically male that are educated from the West. And when they find their way to indigenous Africans running efficient businesses, it’s often nested among men.

“There is money around but it’s just chasing a few examples. They don’t know that there are more examples of women that are doing great businesses in health tech. Also, they don’t know that there are women of African origin that are doing well with the funding we have raised and can do better. For me, that’s the fundamental,” Adebakin told BusinessDay.

Without recourse to social constructs of gender walls, Adebakin has poured grit and sheer passion for deploying knowledge of pharmacy into building a company connected to over 1,000 pharmacies that deliver medicines nationwide and exports abroad.

It took stumbling on a 2022 report by Briter Intelligence for her to realise that she is part of a queer group of women who have raised 3 percent of all the funding invested into African startups. Between 2013 and 2021, 76 percent of the total funding during the eight-year period went to men-led organisations.

Adebakin, like other few in the top echelon of health technology, research and development who are disturbed by the trend, is taking action to sprawl the growth of a generation of girls who will rise to close the gender gap.
The International Women’s Day (IWD) 2023 is themed ‘DigitALL: Innovation and Technology for Gender Equality’.

However, Nigeria is still far from the goal. Female tech startup founders are rising in health tech but yet to bridge the gender divide.

Globally, women make up just 19.9 percent of science and engineering professionals.

According to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, the low representation is compounded by a work environment that is typically male-centric, inflexible, and exclusionary, making the field less attractive to women and other underrepresented groups.

“Gaps in STEM education and careers are larger for women and girls doubly disadvantaged by the intersection of gender with other vulnerabilities,” the UN said in an advocacy piece marking this year’s IWD.

This year, Adebakin is doing something different. She is part of the women forum recently formed under the Health Federation of Nigeria.

The goal is to promote and enable more young female healthcare providers and practitioners to succeed and cope with challenges that are peculiar to women.

She now takes career sessions at her son’s school. In her support to church, her role this month is to guide all the females in their career decision.

“The system that runs and enables more men to rise to the top might be a system that is not equitable for women,” she said.
“We want to show more women that there are women setting up businesses and making multimillion dollars in this country and we are even exporting outside Nigeria. Those examples need to be promoted and broadcast to more women to know they can achieve same.”

Read also: Public Health Communication: A critical tool for better healthcare in Africa

Research

In research of veterinary pathology, infectious diseases humans get from animals directly or through a vector, Dr. Anise Happi, director, Zoonotic Research and Surveillance is using her position as a scientist in a leading role to mother those she trains and mentors at the African Center Of Excellence For Genomics Of Infectious Diseases, the Redeemer’s University, Osun State.

“The peculiarity of this is that it takes a lot of mental work. You have to write grant proposal, make sure you execute it and of course manage people, which is the role of every leader, be it male or female. But sometimes, in a male-dominated field, for your voice to be heard is difficult. But I try to work as hard as I can and let my result speak. The most important is to impact people with science,” she told BusinessDay.

Happi, who was raised by an uneducated mother and trade-inclined father, loved science as a young girl and did well in science, biology, mathematics, physics and chemistry. She never liked literature but always wanted to understand the reason why people get ill and why they manifest certain changes when ill.

The alumnus of the University of Ibadan encourages women to be conscious of their responsibility as a molder, mostly at a time when there is a young population who can be influenced by technology in ways that promote gender balance.

She said: “It is important for us to have time to bring up our children. My mum was not educated but that didn’t stop me. The kind of value and the homey things that we grew up with kept us in line to excel.

“As much as we nurture our career, we should always remember that as women, mothers and sisters, we have very important duty in our society. Parenting is an essential part of the society that if we get it wrong, it will be difficult to correct. If we choose wisely, we will still be able to compete in our careers.”

For Kemi Olawoye, co-founder of Babymigo who leverages technology to provide over 250,000 women with localised resources for pregnancy and motherhood, “society should rate women-run companies by whether the company is being run well, if results are produced, whether services meet the needs of target audience and whether products are scaling.”