The HealthTech Hub Africa (HTHA) has prioritized mentorship as a part of its program as a necessary catalyst for growth and clearing a path to scale. Through Villgro Africa’s leadership in implementing the 2024 acceleration program, 31 enterprises received tailored support through regular check-ins, masterclasses, fireside chats, and technical assistance. One of the most transformative elements of this support was mentorship, which connected founders with seasoned industry leaders who helped turn bold ideas into scalable impact.
Among the standout stories from the cohort is the mentorship pairing between Alan Fok, a seasoned strategist with over a decade of experience in startup growth and ecosystem development, and Edward Mwangi, Co-Founder and CEO, and Denis Maorwe, co founder and Chief Technology Officer, of Digital Patient Engagement (DPE) a Nairobi-based health technology company working to transform how health communication connects to care across Africa.
Their journey illustrates how clarity, trust, and collaboration can reshape a company’s strategy and also its confidence to scale.
For Alan Fok, mentorship is an extension of his long-standing commitment to strengthening emerging ventures. Having advised startups across Africa and beyond, Alan brings a unique combination of strategic insight and systems-level thinking to his work.
When he began working with DPE, he immediately recognized the team’s technical depth and bold ambition. Founders Edward and Dennis had developed a powerful health communication platform capable of integrating complex health data systems, but the company lacked a unifying narrative.
“They had a remarkable technical solution,” Alan reflects, “but it was buried under layers of complexity. The missing piece was a clear, cohesive storyline that aligned their purpose, product, and strategy.”
Over the course of the 12-week mentorship, Alan focused on helping DPE articulate that core “golden thread.” Together, they reframed the company’s mission into a single, bold statement:
“To send 10 billion trusted, integrated, health & climate-smart messages across East and Sub-Saharan Africa in the next five years.”
This became a compass for the company. It provided strategic clarity, simplified the company’s story, and became a rallying point for the team and their stakeholders.
With this renewed focus, Alan connected DPE to targeted networks, opened conversations with potential customers, and helped the founders translate their vision into tangible milestones.
“The most rewarding part of mentoring is witnessing strategic clarity turn into momentum. When founders execute with confidence and focus, that’s when real transformation begins.”
For Edward Mwangi, the mentorship experience with Alan came at a pivotal moment in DPE’s growth.
“From the very first session,” Edward recalls, “it was clear that Alan got it. He understood what we were trying to build and the scale of the challenge.”
DPE had already validated its concept and was advancing an ambitious technical build, but the team was struggling to distill its complexity into a coherent message. Alan’s input changed that.
“He helped us find our wedge, the sharp, simple way to define who we are and what we do. Once we had that, everything fell into place: our pitch deck, our investor conversations, our internal alignment.”
With this clarity, DPE rebuilt its pitch deck and refined its revenue strategy. Investors and partners began responding more strongly, noting how effectively the story captured both the scale and potential of the business.
Beyond messaging, the mentorship helped the founders strengthen their operational strategy — mapping out how to expand into payer and insurer markets, and identifying new climate-health use cases.
“We came out of the mentorship with sharper focus, stronger alignment, and a clear path to scale. It wasn’t always easy. There were uncomfortable truths and difficult adjustments, but that’s exactly where the growth happened.”
The partnership between Alan and Edward exemplifies the power of mentorship done right: structured, empathetic, and impact-oriented.
Through their engagement, DPE achieved several key outcomes:
Perhaps most importantly, the mentorship fostered a trusted, human connection that allowed both mentor and mentee to engage deeply, even across geographies.
“Operating remotely, we had to build trust fast,” Alan notes. “That required deep listening, not just to what was said, but what was unsaid. That’s where the real breakthroughs came from.”
Edward echoes this sentiment: “It felt less like mentorship and more like partnership. Alan was invested in our success. He even rolled up his sleeves and worked alongside us when we needed it most.”
The DPE-Alan mentorship pairing embodies HTHA’s belief that mentorship is not a peripheral add-on — it’s a cornerstone of effective innovation support. In the fast-evolving African healthtech ecosystem, where founders face complex challenges and rapid change, mentorship provides both the structure and the spark for exponential growth.
As HTHA evolves its accelerator model for 2025 — introducing seed funding, paid mentorship, and more focused networking — stories like this reaffirm the enduring value of pairing the right people at the right time.
“Mentorship,” Alan concludes, “is not about giving answers. It’s about co-discovering them, helping founders become better experts of themselves.”
Through mentorship grounded in clarity, trust, and purpose, HealthTech Hub Africa continues to nurture the next generation of innovators transforming health systems across the continent.