The Africa Health Ventures Podcast

Join us in conversation with Rebecca Distler, Strategist for AI, Data, and Digital Health at the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation . She shares the trials and tribulations of a decade spent funding and fund-raising for innovations in global health - and how she's working to change the game, from supporting the Gates Grand Challenges initiatives through her work at the Foundation to advance digital he...

Season 3 of Aid, Evolved digs into the intimidating world of donors and investors in global digital health / healthtech. What's it like to walk a mile in their shoes? How are their actions and decisions influenced, be it by Congress or a Board of Directors, by tax authorities, by personalities, or public relations? We’ll peer inside the day-to-day lives of public and private funders, including big...

Lukonga Lindunda is a startup ecosystem builder. He is Executive Director and co-founder of BongoHive , an award-winning innovation hub and tech incubator based in Lusaka, Zambia, that is changing the landscape of entrepreneurship in the region. Lukonga is a Mandela Washington Fellow and has 15 years of experience working with entrepreneurs and development partners. He began his career providing t...

Dr. Robert Karanja recalls how he founded Villgro Africa, a tech incubator and impact investor focused exclusively on health innovations in Africa. Stick around for the end when Robert shares his predictions for the future of genomics on the continent and his hopes for a new kind of pharmaceutical company for Africa.   Robert began his career with the dream of eradicating malaria. To this end, he...

Like another airborne disease we are all familiar with, tuberculosis (TB) spreads invisibly through the air. If you catch it and you don't treat it, you're likely to die. India has the largest TB burden in the world, with millions of cases diagnosed and over 500,000 deaths every year. Consistent, continuous treatment and management of care is essential to a healthy recovery. This is why the work o...

In the heart of Nigeria's COVID-19 surge in 2020, Samuel Okwuada started receiving a string of phone calls from local pharmacies who were struggling to get stock during lockdown. They needed Samuel to deliver more essential medicines, in smaller quantities, to more locations, at the same or lower costs. This is an impossible equation for any traditional drug distributor to balance - but when it be...

Mara Hansen Staples is on a mission to tear down the glass ceiling that stands between African innovators and global funding. She spent years talking to funders behind closed doors in Geneva, D.C., New York, and London. Throughout these conversations, she was always struck by the question: if our goal is to serve African markets, why aren’t there any Africans in these discussions? Today she has sp...

Alain Nteff is the CEO and Founder of Healthlane. Healthlane delivers precision personal health plans through a network of world-class laboratories in Africa.   Alain's work has been lauded by Bill Gates and honoured by the Queen of England, the President of Rwanda and Rebecca Enonchung. Yet his approach to digital health has undergone dramatic changes over the past ten years.   He started off wit...

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 Bord...

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 th...

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...

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 Chr...

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...

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 pri...

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....

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 ris...

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...

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 dig...

Today I pull together some of the conversations in 2021 that really made my head spin.   I clicked ‘record’ on the first episode of Aid, Evolved just over a year ago. My goal was to tell the stories of people working at the intersection of technology, poverty, and health. I've poked and prodded 28 people from many different walks of the aid sector: funders, innovators, non-profit founders, health...

Jon Jackson is the CEO and Co-Founder of Dimagi , a social enterprise that delivers digital solutions to improve lives in over 130 countries. In today's conversation, we chat with Jon about the influences, the people, and the ideas that took him from being an MIT grad on Wall Street to the trenches building health systems in Zambia. As we reflect on Dimagi's founding story, we also hear Jon's cons...

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 found himself leading a Zambian mobile money company. He opens th...

What would you do if you had millions of dollars to invest in impact? Would you put it in an existing charity - or would you try to do something different, something better? Kevin Starr needed to answer these questions when, in 1993, he unexpectedly found himself at the head of a new foundation named Mulago. Instead of taking the path well traveled, Kevin decided to experiment with creating impact...

Sathy Rajasekharan is the co-Executive Director of Jacaranda Health. Frustrated with the speed of change within larger institutions, Sathy joined Jacaranda to be part of a small, agile, and experimental team. His mission was to lead the charge on local innovation. He joined at a pivotal time, when Jacaranda Health was transforming beyond its origins as a private healthcare provider to create a dig...

Marie Ahmed has worked within USAID to strengthen health systems in Nepal, Rwanda, Côte d'Ivoire, and Thailand. She has a long career in the non-profit and public sector, including time with the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan and over a decade with USAID, the largest contributor of foreign aid in the world.   In this conversation, we recall what inspired Marie to work in the aid sector; her surprise pl...

Evelyn Castle is a woman who just doesn't know when to stop. She has founded multiple social ventures in the technology and health space in Africa. She is best known for her work as Executive Director and Co-Founder of eHealth Africa, a leading digital health implementer for Nigeria that was founded and run from Kano, Nigeria - and now has a growing footprint elsewhere in Africa. She also founded...