Villgro Africa is very pleased to welcome four new additions to our team. Wambui Nyabero, Villgro’s new Chief Technology Officer, is an inventor and innovator who is passionate about the healthcare industry, especially technology that keeps us healthy, and helps us live better and get better faster. Franciscah Nzanga joins us as the Operations Director, bringing her experience in project management, operations, and the implementation of health innovations. Ndeye Thiaw is our newest board member, joining us from Dakar, Senegal, with a background in the financial sphere of Francophone West Africa. Joelle Mumley is a writer and entrepreneur based in Nairobi, and is helping to lead our communications team.
Not only are each of these individuals uniquely qualified for the roles they are filling, but we are excited to be contributing to increased diversity and balance in an industry often dominated by men. As we know, gender diversity in an organisation is not simply a box to be ticked, but a characteristic that identifies a mature organisation. Having a gender balanced group of employees adds value to both Villgro Africa itself as well as the innovators and funders we work with. We view this as a significant milestone in our growth trajectory.
Franciscah Nzanga was motivated to join Villgro Africa because of our holistic support for startups. She understands that, when it comes to running an effective organisation, a great idea is not enough. And much more than money, these innovators need people who are willing to mentor and build capacity. Seeing Villgro’s commitment to this type of support made her confident that joining the team was the right choice. In her role, she plans to support more robust operational systems to facilitate further expansion and growth.
Wambui Nyabero recently returned home to Kenya after more than 20 years living and working in the United States. She is excited about working at Villgro because she wants to not only contribute to specific innovations, but also to improve the entire system. The African medical devices ecosystem is very young and she feels she can make a real impact working for a company like Villgro Africa, to grow the industry as a whole and bring her experience to help innovators succeed.
Ndeye Thiaw, joining our board, currently heads deal sourcing and transaction execution as the managing partner and a co-founder of Brightmore Capital, an impact investment firm focused on enterprises with regional high growth potential. She has experience leading the identification of investment opportunities, executing transactions, actively managing portfolio projects and building relationships with clients in the banking sector. Her professional experience and insights into Francophone West Africa will further strengthen the expertise and knowledge base of our board.
Joelle Mumley has worked for the past four years supporting businesses in the area of writing and communications. She has significant work experience in the African healthcare sector and is excited to help the Villgro team spread their message, raising awareness about the achievements, opportunities and challenges facing the African innovation space.
As Villgro continues to grow, we will stay committed to promoting gender equity, knowing that by doing so we are better equipped to carry out our mission. We are excited to have these new team members on board, each of whom will play a significant part in pushing Villgro Africa closer to achieving our goals.
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
Lishe Living has partnered with 102 nutritionists across Kenya to scale nutrition therapy into homes. The Serve & Earn program is designed to support nutritionists to build their nutrition consultancies on the Lishe Living platform, which supports the process of assessing diets, generating meal plans and providing evidence-based nutrition solutions for over 50 health conditions. The nutritionists can send clients medical nutrition reports and bill them using Lishe Living’s payment system.
The Serve & Earn program goes beyond providing access to Lishe Living’s platform. In addition to strengthening decision-making in nutrition practice, Lishe Living provides the nutritionists weekly sales coaching and social media marketing workshops. The program aims to scale evidence-based nutrition therapy across Kenya while supporting long-term unemployed nutritionists to earn a living from their passion.
Kijenzi was contracted by Nayla Tech to produce their innovative prosthetic hands. Nayla’s Nuha hand is “a body-powered, mechanical prosthetic that serves as a light weight, robust, and efficient solution for individuals in underdeveloped communities.”
The Nuha is developed to be 3D print and Nayla was beginning a new round of trials in their home country of Sudan. While Nayla has 3D printing capabilities, they turned to Kijenzi because they needed consistent quality across a large volume of these hands.
Many companies realize that the ability to develop a digitally manufactured product and the ability to produce them commercially or at scale are very different skills. That is where Kijenzi’s enterprise resource planning system and the quality and engineering systems built on that come in to play.
Kijenzi was able to receive their their final design on a Sunday and ship out 180 components by Wednesday – all inspected and packaged for shipping to Sudan. After final assembly by Nayla Tech, the hands were on patients by Monday morning! Moving forward, Kijenzi and Nayla have formed a partnership where Kijenzi will be able to set up local manufacturing hubs to produce Nuha hands when and where Nayla will need them.
John Gersheson – Co-founder Kijenzi
Villgro Africa has embarked on a series of events as we expand our vision and services across the continent. Wilfred Njagi, Villgro Africa Co-founder & CEO takes us through the journey of replicating the Villgro incubation model in Africa.
Since 2015, Villgro Africa has disbursed $1M in funding across 20 enterprises, with the annual budget growing to $1.5M, We have touched and improved about 2.2 million lives in East Africa. Wilfred shares what it will take to amplify the impact and what he is looking forward to experience in this next phase of growth.
We started with rebranding from Villgro Kenya to Villgro Africa in October last year. We also joined Afrilabs, a network of incubators in Africa. We have gone on to reach out to 10 incubators in Africa that are interested in joining the Villgro family. These 10 incubators will be taken through months of training and refresher courses in incubation best practices and also periodic knowledge sharing sessions (Wednesday Wisdom Events). Villgro Africa will sponsor these incubators to go through a one year of training and handholding. At the end of the program a few incubators will be selected for a joint incubation program roll-out.
Villgro USA has curated the following training topics in the next 6 months:
(Note: VITALS – Villgro Information Tracking and Learning System, is a cloud-based MIS for incubation management – that greatly assists with workflow)
The current batch of incubators have been selected from Ghana(4), Tanzania (1), Zambia (5)
Outside the structured training program the Wisdom Wednesday Series will be available for any interested incubators or ESOs to join free of cost. The calendar of events can be found on this link >> https://www.villgro-us.org/events?trk=organization-update_share-update_update-text
The incubators we select will be based on:
– Impact focus – Committed to improving lives at the BoP
– M&E – ability to continuously measure and report impact
– Maturity & Stability – at least 3 years of operations
– Should be open to learning from each other and adding value to the network
– Willing to participate in periodic reviews
– Willingness to be part of a network
– Sizeable footprint (10-15 employees, sizeable portfolio, with at least 300K-500K annual budget
While the East Africa operations will remain predominantly healthcare focused, the incubators we are working with in other regions are sector agnostic. We are open to new sectors as we expand across the continent.. The Villgro methodology works for any sector. In the last five years we have fairly covered East Africa. We are not biased but we would like to see some presence in West Africa and the SADC region. We will be happy to form partnerships that help us to cover those regions.
The speed of accelerating impact. If you look at what we have done in the last 5 years, we have touched 2M+ lives, unlocked $17M in follow on funding. There is a multiplier effect. We can achieve the same impact in half the time. If we add 10 more incubators in Africa, we will have touched 20M lives in the next 5 years.
Discoverability of startups in emerging ecosystems– In some of the African ecosystems we don’t hear a lot of transactions happening. Most of the deals in Africa are concentrated in Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, South Africa, Ghana but we are a continent of 54 countries. We would like to shed some light on what’s happening in some of these less celebrated ecosystems. We look forward to discovering startups and helping improve deal flow by working with incubators in countries like Senegal, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone to support startups and help them unlock follow on funding.
As we scale across the continent we envision a Pan African call for innovations. Africa needs to build home grown solutions to the rising global challenges around disease outbreak surveillance, food insecurity, planetary health (one health), cushioning livelihoods against pandemics like COVID -19 among many other challenges. We want to be a go to partner for anyone who wants to do pan-African thematic call for innovations that touch on these issues in a multi-country approach.
Alignment with other incubators. We want to ensure a win-win scenario where we leverage each other’s strengths. We will only work with incubators that are aligned and feel the same way about the partnership.
As Villgro we want to learn from these incubators because they understand the local context better than us, they have the in-county presence and that is something we cannot overlook. As we share with them the best case practices and processes and they will be sharing with us the local context, local networks and local resources in return.
“What encourages me most is that Villgro Kenya started from a very humble beginning. We started with less than $100K in funding from Lemelson Foundation and Grand Challenges Canada. We had three co-founders who were willing to sacrifice their time and even take pay cuts.”. Today we have been able to disburse over $1M in funding across 20 enterprises, our annual budget has grown to $1.5M, We have touched and improved about 2.2 million lives in East Africa as per our 5 year impact report . That journey of growth is inspiring. We want the incubators we work with to have a similar success story to be able to grow and expand and leverage the Villgro brand and networks. The fact that the replication has been tried and tested is encouraging. Villgro has had success replicating its incubation model with other incubators within India and globally. We formed Villgro Africa in 2015 (to serve East Africa and Ethiopia) and Villgro Philippines in 2016 (to serve South East Asia) and started training incubators in South Asia (Bangladesh, Vietnam, Nepal, Myanmar, Tajikistan, and the Philippines). I can’t wait for us to have a Villgro presence in Latin America, this is inspiring in itself.