16Sep

Villgro Africa Innovator Spotlight: ilara Health

September 16, 2021 Benedict 0

An Interview with ilara Health Founder, Emilian Popa

ilara Health’s vision is “a world in which early detection and preventative healthcare are accessible to everyone, everywhere.” In order to achieve this in Africa’s hyper fragmented primary care ecosystem, they are creating a new model of care by partnering with existing primary care facilities in Kenya, and soon across Africa. ilara Health began in early 2019 with providing diagnostic and digital solutions to healthcare facilities. More recently they have started to take a holistic view of clinics’ operations by creating a digital platform that can address their primary challenges.

What is your innovation?

ilara Health was founded to bring point of care diagnostic devices to settings where they were not accessible and/or affordable. As we grew, we realized we needed to go further and help rebuild the primary care ecosystem for this urbanizing demographic across the continent by digitizing it through developing a clinic operating system to enable the introduction of future services.

“Our focus to date has been on building a network of clinics across Kenya through the deployment of diagnostic tools. We are evolving into bringing essential services to the clinic to drive its growth and improve the care it is able to deliver, to ultimately brand and consolidate a core set of clinics. To do this, we’ve needed to develop a clinic operating system to enable the introduction of future services. Our system has been built to address pain points in patient and clinic management that make a clinician’s life more difficult than it should be. This same system generates clinic-wide data that enables us to introduce new services to develop the healthcare ecosystem. This puts us in a unique position to expand our footprint at the clinic level.” – Emilian Popa, ilara Health Founder

What progress have you recently made that you are celebrating?

We have been able to place diagnostic devices in over 650 small clinics (out of about 8,500 private primary care facilities in the country), building our overall network. We have also been accelerating the development of our technology platform, with the goal of implementing it in 300 primary care facilities by the end of the year.

How has being part of the Villgro Africa incubation program impacted your growth?

The primary benefit of participating in the incubation program was Villgro’s local knowledge and understanding of the healthcare and startup ecosystem. We were connected with local healthcare experts as well as startups all across the world who we were able to learn from. In order to succeed, we need to understand our market and also gain insight into other markets, like India, that are five or ten years ahead of where Kenya is today.

“ilara has a very strong team that is very execution focused. We could see the inputs we were giving being put into action very quickly. Looking at their impact numbers, the work they’ve done is amazing. They are sitting on a goldmine of data, which can be useful for so many other things, including pharmaceutical and insurance companies. It’s been a very exciting partnership and there have also been other synergies between ilara and other companies in the portfolio.” – Wilfred Njagi, Villgro Africa CEO

What are you hoping to achieve in the next 6 months to one year?

There are three main pillars we are focusing on:

(1) Continuing to build the network. We are currently in 650 primary care clinics and pharmacies and our goal is to get to 1,000. This would mean we would cover around 25-35% of the serviceable addressable market.

(2) Digitisation of the clinics within our networks. The goal is to reach 300 by the end of the year.

(3) Once we have a platform and operational and financial visibility through data from the medical facilities, we plan to grow value-added services and products for primary care facilities, such as personalized micro-insurance, micro financing, and new digital health technologies based on unbiased datasets in order for them to benefit and for ilara to generate more value. We are currently running several pilots focused on lending and insurance services.

“Beyond incubation I see many opportunities for continuous collaboration. If you look at ilara as a network, it has the possibility of plugging in so many other healthcare innovations into it.” – Wilfred Njagi, Villgro Africa CEO

04Sep

Call for Applications

September 4, 2021 Benedict 0

CALL FOR HEALTHCARE INNOVATIONS IN KENYA

Kenya National Innovation Agency (KeNIA), Villgro Africa, ICChange and Kijenzi have partnered in a search for healthcare entrepreneurs with ideas, devices, technologies or software that have the potential to ensure affordable healthcare to all Kenyans.

Read more about the call below and proceed to apply using this link. Feel free to download and/or share with your networks.

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24Aug

The Medical Device Entrepreneurship Journey

August 24, 2021 Benedict 0

How to Do More With Less: Cost Cutting Development Strategies

On 1st July 2021, Villgro Africa held its second iteration of the Innovators Forum, a forum committed to building resilience through investment in biomedical and diagnostics innovation and manufacturing in Kenya. Titled “How To Design and Manufacture Ventilators in Kenya,” the discussion served as an accelerated case study on the development, approval and manufacturing of medical devices.

The conversation was rich, covering the many triumphs and challenges encountered by the brave souls who have ventured into the uncharted territory of medical device development — and did so in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been marked by global supply chain upheavals. It was therefore no surprise that one of the challenges highlighted was the difficulty and cost of obtaining components and test equipment. The discussion brought to light the need for cost control, especially in the early proof-of-concept stage. Several opportunities for improvement were identified for the very new Kenyan medtech ecosystem. The following thoughts address the opportunity for cost-cutting in the prototyping stage, which could enable entrepreneurs to move faster towards their commercialization goals.

To keep the cost of developing a proof of concept low, entrepreneurs can (and definitely should) start their rapid prototyping with low-fidelity prototypes that are inexpensive and simply help communicate their ideas to users for quick feedback.

At the very beginning of a design/development process, these low-fidelity prototypes could be made out of inexpensive, easy-to-obtain materials such as wood, PVC pipes, duct tape, plastic sheets, etc. In the case of user interfaces, they can be simple PowerPoint mockups illustrating user interaction. As the user needs are better understood through feedback and observation, more functional and complete models can then be fabricated.

During the next stage, it may be that specific functionality needs to be proved out by building specific engineering models. These are often sub-systems that can be tested in isolation of the complete system. In the case of ventilators, a good example would be putting together a system to mix oxygen and medical air to test which type of valves and electronic drivers are flexible enough to meet user requirements. This level of development is very engineering heavy and although, ultimately, the functionality meets a user need, the purpose of the prototype is simply to prove technical feasibility.

At this point, things become less straight forward because, although it is not yet essential to have medical-grade components, the testing often has to be done with high-end components that will mimic the ultimate medical-grade functionality. These will often need to be imported, since the medical device supply chain is currently not fully supported locally. To reduce the cost of development, innovators can look into organizational assistance from bodies such as the Kenya Association of Manufacturers (KAM) that have access to the most current information on government subsidies and incentives for manufacturers. In the example of ventilators, KAM is able to work with innovators on duty remission for raw materials. This can result in tax savings that provide entrepreneurs additional funds for development.

Developing medical devices from initial concept to the point of bringing it to market is a long and complex process. By focusing on the larger picture and understanding the purpose of each step in the process, innovators can learn to prioritize in ways that reduce their costs without hindering their progress. By using a rapid prototyping approach and using appropriate levels of complexity in prototypes, innovators can have a more cost-effective development strategy. Additionally, government subsidies and incentives can further help by reducing the cost of expensive high-tech components.

10Aug

Villgro Africa Announces the “Harnessing the Power of AI for Africa’s Development” Top 11 Innovations

August 10, 2021 Benedict 1

The Artificial Intelligence for Development (AI4D) program is a joint partnership between the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada and Sida, Sweden’s government agency for development cooperation. The program aims to support innovation, conduct policy research and develop the skills necessary to inspire and catalyse responsible AI development on the African continent.

At the start of 2021, AI4D partnered with Villgro Africa in developing a Call for Innovations entitled “Harnessing the Power of AI for Africa’s Development”, which generated a tremendous response from across the continent. The aim of the call is to uncover African-led AI innovations that will be instrumental in catalyzing the emerging AI ecosystem towards responsible development of the technology while strengthening the capacity of African innovators to scale their impact and improve development outcomes within the context of sustainability and/or commercial viability.

The call generated a robust response of over 180 applications from 18 countries and resulted in 11 finalists. These startups represent 11 different countries on the continent and provide solutions in a variety of sectors including agriculture, maternal health, medical diagnostics, disability assistance and financial inclusion.

Agrix Tech, a Cameroonian startup, has developed an application that helps farmers detect, treat, and prevent crop diseases sustainably and in an environmentally friendly manner.
Located in both Mauritius and Tanzania, Agripoa has created a farm management software that uses AI to support farmers in planning, monitoring, and analysing all farm activities by linking them with input suppliers, agronomists, insurance, and financial institutions.
Tanzania’s Redefine Africa is creating machine learning software that can be deployed on retail account customers and agent data to provide a model that can predict churn and activity.
XSENSEAI, also based in Tanzania, has developed an AI web application to detect breast cancer as early as possible based on ultrasound images, with a detection accuracy currently of 91%.
Ocular Makarere AI Lab, which started in Uganda, has developed a diagnostic AI tool to improve the accuracy of malaria testing.
Zambia’s Dawa Health has created a digital health platform that increases access to maternal health for pregnant and nursing mothers.
Sekani, based in Kenya, has an application software that uses AI and neural networks to translate sign language to fill the communication gap between the deaf and hearing.
Burkina Faso’s Naana Technologies is a software application that uses ultrasound images of the breast to aid clinicians in the diagnosis of breast cancer.
Based in Mali, Yelenkoura Technologies creates an intelligent electronic guidance device that helps blind people perceive their environment through vibration and sound alerts.
Senegal’s Brain Tumor Detection provides a computer vision approach for detecting brain tumors.
Streamline is a community health-based insurance in rural areas of Uganda through a digital insurance platform that utilises machine learning in pricing of premiums, cost management, and fraud detection.

23Jul

Villgro Africa Support for Innovations Addressing the COVID-19 Pandemic

July 23, 2021 Benedict 1

A few weeks after the COVID-19 virus first arrived on African continent, Villgro Africa invited African innovators with solutions that could contribute to the fight against COVID-19 to apply for funding. About 60 applications from 7 countries (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Zimbabwe and South Africa) were submitted in response to the call. Out of these, 12 companies from East Africa, with support from the Lemelson Foundation, were selected for funding with amounts ranging from $5,000 to $20,000.

This Villgro Africa COVID-19 portfolio has since made important contributions to COVID-19 response efforts in the region. Kijenzi supplied over 2,000 locally manufactured PPE’s to hospitals in Western Kenya in the early days of the pandemic when supply shortages were critical. Similarly, Simbona Africa quickly built and supplied UVC-based room sanitizers and cabinets to hospitals, schools, and hotels in Addis Ababa and Jimma cities. These devices enabled frontline workers to decontaminate rooms and surfaces and recycle masks to keep serving Ethiopians despite PPE shortages. Rescue/Flare provided free ambulance services to save the lives of hundreds of pregnant women in Kenya, who went into labor during strict dusk-to-dawn curfew hours when the movement of people and vehicles was not allowed. Damu Sasa enabled the resumption of blood donation services by mobilizing blood donors and providing a booking service that ensured COVID-19 social distancing rules were observed. This helped hospitals refill blood banks and address critical shortages. Neopenda’s Neowatch device provided remote monitoring of patient vitals (heart rate, temperature, respiratory rate and oxygen concentration) limiting contact between health workers and patients and reducing the risk of COVID-19 infections. Lishe Living created safe virtual spaces for people suffering from non-communicable diseases to continue receiving peer support for monitoring blood sugar, adherence to medication, and other lifestyle management practices to avoid disease progression and improve immunity against infection of COVID-19.

In line with Villgro Africa’s holistic approach to incubation, the COVID-19 portfolio companies were not only given financial support but also provided with a range of services, including diagnostic (expert) panels, mentorship from prominent and experienced leaders, peer networking with like-minded and compatible innovators, and connected with potential strategic partners.

This COVID-19 portfolio has so far generated $1,092,620 in follow-on funding and the portfolio contributed to the creation of 87 jobs. From the original companies awarded, Simbona and Lishe Living will be migrated to the non-COVID-19 portfolio for further incubation support for a period of 1-2 years, and Damu Sasa has received $50,000 in follow-on funding.

14Jul

Q&A WITH WILFRED – FIRST YEAR AT THE HELM

July 14, 2021 Benedict 1

You have completed one year as Villgro Africa’s CEO. How do you feel?

The year has gone by quite fast. I have settled into the new role quite well, thanks to having both Rob and Robert as my co-founders. Having a co-founding team makes life much easier compared to being a solo founder. We are very well aligned as a leadership and have built a world class team over the last few years. This is bound to improve with more female team members joining the leadership and gives me a lot of confidence. Overall, we have done quite well as an organization. Despite COVID-19, our portfolio companies’ performances have improved, with their revenues increasing by almost 30% and the funding they raised grew tremendously.

Our annual budget more than doubled within a year and we have sight of incubators we want to partner with in the Pan-African expansion plan. We have definitely overachieved in some areas so, overall, I feel good about where we are.

In your acceptance letter, you boldly declared that Villgro Africa would be at the forefront of driving the SDGs in Africa. What progress have you made towards this?

Achieving sustainable impact will require a village mentality. At the beginning of my term, Villgro Africa joined Afrilabs, a pan-African network of incubators. We also joined the Association of Startup Enablers in Kenya (ASSEK) and my co-founder Robert was elected as their chair. We are also in other member networks like the ANDE network, CHRead and Early Stage Capital Providers (ESCP). Collaborating with other actors allows you to share lessons, best practices and pipeline. Similar to a biological ecosystem where an organism can’t thrive on its own, we have learnt to rely on other ecosystem actors to work towards achieving the SGDs.

We have started testing the waters through the AI4D call, which was a Pan-African call for solutions based on artificial intelligence that attracted over 250 applications from over 20 countries across the continent. This is a testament that collaboration with other incubators in Africa is needed. We are also looking at expanding our board to make it more Pan-African. It’s more than just plugging in; we want to be more involved in the local ecosystems throughout the continent. Through our partnership with Villgro Global we have identified and started training 10 incubators within the continent using our playbook.

We had envisioned that if we could train around 10 incubators, then we might be able to build solid partnerships with some of them after training and do a joint Pan-African call for innovations. Our ethos is that when we come together, the entrepreneur wins. We are also very keen to learn from these partner incubators because they are on the ground and more anchored. It’s two-way traffic. As we partner with them, we will grow. Even our sector scope will broaden because most of them are sector agnostic.

Our current operations across East Africa are also diversifying. From the recently concluded ICIPE/BioInnovate program we selected three companies in Ethiopia for $20,000 each in grant funding. We also shortlisted 10 AI companies from 10 countries in Africa for a grant award of between $5,000 to $10,000 each. As we move further beyond East Africa, we will need local incubator partners in the new countries. AI allows the continent to leapfrog towards attaining the SGDs. It’s a sector that we can’t ignore. That’s why we have brought in Dr. Deogratias Mzurikwao to lead the AI vertical. Dr. Deo holds Ph.D. from the University of Kent on the Application of Artificial Intelligence in healthcare, under the commonwealth scholarship.

You mentioned the growth of portfolio companies. What are the lessons learnt from the growth in numbers?

We should be adaptive and willing to change operations. Pandemics and catastrophes give one an opportunity to evolve. Startups that evolved were able to increase their revenues. Some pivoted and came up with new products, like Flare. Others had to scale down their operations costs.

Listening to the customer’s needs is essential. It reached a point where patients wanted to be treated at home, so those that listened to their customers found an opportunity to start healthcare delivery services. Neopenda found an opportunity to redesign their neonatal remote monitoring wearable bands to adult bands to help monitor COVID-19 in order to reduce the risk of infections within facilities.

When COVID-19 came, it was an opportunity for us to step up and remain relevant even during this period. That is how we ended up with the call for COVID-19 innovations. For companies that rely on day-to-day sales, it made sense for them to scale down on their operation costs to extend their runway. But for us in healthcare, it was mostly a call to step on the pedal and increase our support. The pandemic cut both ways. While others were scaling down, others were scaling up.

It was also an opportunity for us to partner with other organizations so that if the clients one company was serving needed a different service, they would be able to partner with another organization that fills that need. For example, brick and mortar clinics serving walk-in clients who may desire at-home healthcare diagnosis saw an opportunity to partner with telemedicine companies that already had the platform set up.

Gender-wise, what measures have you and the leadership team put in place to help reduce the gap between female-led and male-led startups in the region?

For us to have gender balance, we need to look at where decisions are being made, as highlighted in the GALI report, which found out that entrepreneurship support organizations (ESOs) were widening the gender funding gap. To make our decision process favorable to women-led startups, we began by increasing women in our board. We have brought in Dr. Beatrice Murage and Ms. Ndeye Thiaw. We have also made some changes at the senior management level. We brought two fantastic ladies, Eng. Wambui Nyabero as the Chief Technology Officer and Franciscah Nzanga as Director of Operations.

The next level of change will be focusing on how to better target female-led enterprises. Naturally, men tend to be more aggressive and are more likely to apply for business plan competitions compared to their female counterparts. Our calls for applications attract male founded companies 80% of the time. We have to be very intentional in scouting more female led enterprises, especially in healthcare, if we want to reach more end beneficiaries. This can be underpinned by the fact that women have a better health seeking behaviour compared to men. They are likely to show up at a facility for a check up compared to men. This is more so for women with children. Therefore, a female startup founder understands the healthcare needs of other women much better.

What do you feel is the biggest strength of Villgro Africa right now?

Our biggest asset right now is the team. We have built a very talented team with multidisciplinary skill sets ranging from engineers to business analysts, healthcare researchers to AI experts, among others.

Our proven track record speaks for itself. We have a robust process of doing things. Very few incubators offer the kind of high-level support we give to our incubatees. We can use the term precision incubation to describe the process. Each founder gets specialized, customized support depending on their stage of enterprise development, their prior entrepreneurial experience, the type of innovation, etc. That’s how we are able to get 17 times the leverage on every dollar invested in our companies.

Paint a picture of where you see Villgro Africa and the startup ecosystem in the next one year.

In the next year, we see ourselves doing joint incubation programs in more than two regions, including SADC and West Africa. We have already seen Nigerian companies entering East Africa very successfully, and we want to help our companies scale across regions as a result of our expansion. For example, Ilara Health is keen to scale into Ethiopia and the SADC region. Even for companies that have graduated from our portfolio, like Turaco and others, we will be happy to help them scale in West Africa through partner incubators. I see a lot of intra-continental expansion happening as a result of the Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCTA) agreement that was signed recently, so it is the right time for us to scale.

We also want to scale our reach and impact. As one incubator, we have unlocked close to $20 million of follow-on funding for startups in the last 5 years. If you multiply that by 5 incubators, then we end up unlocking $100 million for African startups in the next 3-5 years through these partnerships. In terms of direct impact, we have been able to touch 2 million lives in East Africa in the last 5 years. If we work with 5 other incubators, we can increase that to 10 million lives. We will see a lot of leverage in terms of funding raised, impact, and expansion. Our incubatees should follow suit and we will be happy to help portfolio companies working with other incubators expand to new regions.

Since we don’t want to be both the goalkeeper and the referee, we are looking at external independent M&E partners who will ensure that the data we are reporting is verifiable. We do not want to just check SDG boxes but ensure that we remain very objective with our impact numbers.

As we move forward, we want to continue building on where we have come from and what we have learned along the way, while also being open to new and unexpected opportunities. We will stay committed to our vision of supporting innovators and continue to use every tool available to expand our impact and extend our reach. We remain open to partnering with organizations that want to be part of this common agenda of transforming lives throughout the continent.

23Jun

Villgro Africa Disburses $170K to Innovators

June 23, 2021 Benedict 1

Villgro Africa, an impact investor incubating and supporting early-stage social entrepreneurs in Africa to grow and scale through technical assistance and investments, has disbursed funding to five different start-ups, amounting to a total of $170,000. The organisations include Simbona, DawaPay, Wekebere and Damu Sasa.

Simbona: $50,000
DawaPay: $50,000
Wekebere: $20,000
Damu-Sasa: $50,000

Simbona, based in Ethiopia, is a healthcare research and development company that designs and develops healthcare equipment and ICT systems, including a UV light that was developed in response to COVID-19, killing the virus and therefore allowing reuse of PPE along with complete sanitization of spaces and equipment. They have been given a $50,000 grant specifically in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“With the support of Villgro Africa, Simbona has worked on business model development, sales team building, UV machine design improvement, and organizational restructuring. Since receiving 50,000 USD, Simbona has been working on various critical activities related to ultraviolet technology manufacturing and sales as a company. We have been able to produce more than 75 machines for hospitals, universities, hotels and so on.” Habtamu Abafoge, Founder of Simbona Africa.

DawaPay is a Kenyan digital platform that partners with pharmaceutical manufacturers in promoting last-mile distribution of affordable essential medicines and laboratory consumables to urban and peri-urban based retail pharmacies and medical labs respectively, while facilitating efficiency on the delivery logistics, saving customers money and time. Villgro Africa has recently invested $50,000 in equity in the Dawapay pre-seed round towards positioning for the syndicate round.

Wekebere is based in Kampala, Uganda and is developing a maternal healthcare device that focuses on improving access to quality, timely, affordable antenatal care services by offering home-based and hospital-based monitoring that aims to improve the working conditions of midwives while promoting early detection and prevention of pregnancy complications, one of the leading cause of maternal mortality in Africa. Villgro Africa has recently invested $20,000 in grant funding towards product refinement and initial clinical pilot on safety and efficiency at Kawempe Referral Hospital, which delivers an average of 80 babies per day.This will help the business in further refining the device and preparing for a clinical trial with 2,000 mothers in four districts across Uganda, towards mass production and integration into the healthcare system.

“The seed funding from Villgro helped us to accelerate development and clinical validation of the Wekebere device and it will help us to build out our commercialisation efforts for the first product.” Stephen Tashobya, Founder and CEO of Wekebere

Damu-Sasa is based in Nairobi, Kenya and has received a COVID-19 focused grant of $50,000. They provide a cloud-based, end-to-end blood services information management system to support the sourcing of blood, managing inventory and transfusion processes including haemovigilance, thereby ensuring well-informed decision making based on the data they collect. The grant will enable Damu Sasa to enlarge their mobile application base to include iOS users while also expanding the number of facilities using the system.

“The Damu Sasa team are extremely focused and committed to solving the challenges within the blood services supply chain. We at Villgro Africa are keen to collaborate with them to achieve their vision while looking to unlock more capital as they grow the organization.” Rob Beyer, Cofounder and Executive Chair of Villgro Africa

19Jun

Job Opening : Senior Investment Analyst (Full Time)

June 19, 2021 Benedict 0

We are on the lookout for an exceptional person to support our maiden pre-seed and seed stage healthcare-focused invention fund, being built by a team of bright and full of humor people who share a vision for scouting, backing and hand-holding healthcare-based solutions across East Africa. You will be joining Villgro Africa’s maiden Rift Valley Bioventures, a healthcare-based technologies and inventions fund based in Nairobi. You will support fund structuring, origination, due diligence, and portfolio management and exit of investee companies across East Africa.

▪ Role: Senior Investment Analyst
▪ Reporting to: Partner
▪ Location: Nairobi, Kenya, with regional travel as necessary (respecting all health protocols)
▪ Apply: Please fill in this form, and send your CV only to [email protected]
▪ Deadline: 30th June 2021

View document below for more information.

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16Jun

Health Fintech Solution wins USD 250,000 from the Swiss-Re Foundation

June 16, 2021 Benedict 1

Villgro Africa portfolio company clinicPesa has recently won USD 250,000 through the Swiss-Re Foundation competition for the People’s Choice Award! They will be invited to connect with potential investors at an event hosted by Sankalp Forum, one of the world’s largest platforms for impact enterprises.

ClinicPesa is a health fintech solution with the mandate of improving access to healthcare financing for the uninsured population in Uganda and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Uganda currently has no national health insurance fund (NHIF), meaning that if people can’t afford to pay for private insurance, they must carry the weight of paying healthcare costs out of pocket. This often leads to an avoidance of treatment until things are very serious and has also seen an increase in drug resistance as patients can only afford half the dose prescribed, hence accelerating the burden of poverty as a result of high healthcare expenses.

In response to this challenge, ClinicPesa leverages mobile money infrastructure to promote healthcare savings through flexible savings programs and by providing top-up loans which primarily promotes accessible high quality healthcare services.This encourages people to focus on prevention and early intervention in order to solve health challenges before they escalate.

The ClinicPesa team has been working with Villgro Africa since June of 2018. At that time, ClinicPesa did not yet have a fully functional product or solid go-to-market partnerships in place. Over the past few years, they have received funding from Villgro Africa, GIZ, MIT, D-Labs, FSDU and others totalling to over USD 500,000. Additionally, the team has grown from 2 people to 33 in total. Excitingly, they are currently in the final step before a commercial launch of the product in partnership with MTN Uganda and Equity Bank Limited and over the 1,400 facilities including hospitals, clinics and pharmacies.

In addition to their primary service, ClinicPesa has also developed a maternal healthcare product; ClinicPesa Mamas applies gamification in promoting savings towards the cost of transport to and from the hospital for antenatal care, postnatal care, delivery costs and a delivery kit, which is a care kit containing items for the mothers and babies.

The company is also in the process of raising a syndicate round of USD 2 million to facilitate business growth in Uganda.

Villgro Africa would like to congratulate clinicPesa on their impressive progress over the past several years and look forward to continued partnership as they launch their product and positively impact the African health sector.

11Jun

Innovators Forum: Building Resilience Through Investment in Biomedical and Diagnostics Innovation and Manufacturing in Kenya

June 11, 2021 Benedict 0

COVID-19 is taking its toll on Africa, reemphasising persistent structural weaknesses that overexpose countries like Kenya to the social, health and economic impacts of the pandemic. These include a high dependency on imports in areas such as drugs, machinery and equipment, weak local production systems, limited digital connectivity and the prevalence of informal micro businesses.

However, as well as highlighting reasons for concern, Kenya’s response to COVID-19 also has the potential to accelerate innovation, improve the response of healthcare systems and ignite a growth recovery, unlocking industrialisation, modernisation and continental integration.

In this first event of the Innovators Forum, we will be convening a diverse group of experts to share their experiences and insights. Together, we will explore the channels through which trade and industrial policies can help launch a renewed, job-rich and sustainable development agenda in Kenya; one that leverages immense untapped national and regional potential, enables homegrown innovation to thrive and opens up new opportunities for local business to create new and better jobs.

Date: 17th June 2021

Time : 2.00pm – 4.00pm EAT

Venue : Online. To register visit Bobab