People are the backbone of any organization and it is important that any business invests well in them irrespective of the size. Startups are usually faced with a myriad of challenges when it comes to Human Resource Management. Some of these include lack of well documented HR Policies and compliance systems and lack of a proper system for continuous performance feedback for employees and employee feedback for better management.
Villgro Africa conducted a Human Resource Audit for Startups Masterclass to give startups within our portfolio an opportunity to learn about the relevant HR Laws and Policies.
The Masterclass was hosted by Mr. Steve Mwiti and Rob Beyer. Participants were present for the training which enabled them to recognize challenges in their HR systems and equipped them with the necessary skills to address those challenges.
With the onset of the pandemic, the healthcare scene in Kenya has shifted. Fewer households are willing to pay for health insurance as it is no longer a basic need.
Research shows that households in developing countries spent $148 billion out-of-pocket for healthcare expenses in 2015, and each year 100 million people are pushed into extreme poverty because of the high cost of healthcare. Most Kenyans pay for their healthcare “out of pocket”. When it comes to insurance, only 11% of Kenya’s population have health insurance. Covid-19 has had a continued impact on the same.
How can we help the majority of Kenyan households – many of whom are unemployed, casual, or gig workers – to get access to and afford primary health care?
Spindle Design organized this timely and insightful conversation with experts in the field on the opportunities for innovation and how we can create impactful businesses in health financing.
Wilfred Njagi, Villgro Africa Chief Executive Officer & Co-founder, joined the panel discussion alongside Wanza Mbole, Senior Economic Inclusion Advisor of FSD Kenya, and Alice Machichi, Lead, Digital Health Innovation of PharmAccess Foundation.
Key Challenges
Recommendations
“The coping mechanisms we employ lead to catastrophic effects because the disease doesn’t wait. The only way out of the vicious cycle is if we start prioritizing healthcare. Governments & households need to start prioritizing healthcare by putting aside money for it. “ – Wilfred Njagi
Pitfalls Innovators Fall into While Innovating for the Low- & Middle-Income Segments
In Kenya alone, over 1 million critical pathology tests are inefficiently referred from 10,000 registered medical facilities to less than 30 labs and 80 pathologists each year. This translates to a lack of access to these critical services to patients from remote areas in the country.
The Pathology Network is changing this imbalance through a membership-based lab test referral platform where subscribing hospitals are connected to an efficient network of labs and pathologists at pre-negotiated rates.
Lab tests are funneled to member labs who process them and distribute the work to a network of member pathologists through a digital pathology framework. TPN uses AI integration to assist in cancer screening and diagnosis. Patients are immediately notified of their results, saving valuable time and money.
In two years, the medical technology company has been able to deliver quality pathology services to over 9,000 patients in about one third of the country.
Dr. Joshua Kibera the Founder of The Pathology Network shares his experience working with Villgro Africa to increase access to affordable diagnostics across the region.
“Before we joined Villgro Africa, we were floundering. We knew we had potential to become a great company but didn’t have the tools or funding to test some of our basic assumptions.
One of our primary assumptions was that hospitals and pathology labs would be willing to pay for our software. To test this assumption, we needed funds to visit facilities in numerous towns and cities selling our product.
Villgro Africa’s funding helped us learn that the market wants an efficient service and not another software. We pivoted to provide the actual service which we had initially intended to enable through our product.
When we needed support in financial modeling, we turned again to Villgro Africa. They helped develop our first financial model which gave us wonderful clarity and confirmed the pivot we were already considering. To top it all, Villgro Africa paid for a sales training course, which has turned our ad-hoc sales into a repeatable sales process.
It doesn’t end there – Villgro Africa’s investment was an endorsement of our company and of us as founders. Their introductions to other investors have led to follow-on funding which is catalyzing further growth of our service. When we joined Villgro we were more of a company with an idea, now we are a company with an actual business. Thanks Villgro Africa!”
Gibson Muriuki, Villgro Africa’s Investment Manager, has worked closely with Dr. Kibera and his team reiterated the need for tailor-made business incubation programs for startups in the region.
“In my reflection of the journey with The Pathology Network for the past year, I cannot help but think of the need for an evolving and robust Startup Ecosystem that tailor-makes their program to individual startups. This includes the process of identifying viable ideas and accelerating the growth path for social enterprises.
Villgro Africa has walked the talk and lived up to its expectation of supporting African enterprises for Africans by collaborating with passionate and great entrepreneurs like Dr. Joshua, CEO at The Pathology Network, in not only achieving success but also changing the narrative for African founders.”
As The Pathology Network scales to create access to quality pathology services across the region, Villgro Africa will continue to offer its support and expertise.
By Moses Waweru
Streamline Health is a Ugandan health-tech company founded by Samuel Mugisha and two other co-founders in 2017. Streamline was established to help rural hospitals in Africa transition from paper-based to electronic medical record (EMR) keeping. Paper-based records are difficult to manage and maintain. Preparing, storing, and retrieving them can be very time-consuming. They are bulky and take up much-needed space, and they are also easily susceptible to damage. The Streamline Health EMR platform is adapted to conditions in such settings, where patient numbers can be high while health workers tend to be fewer than in urban areas. Furthermore, many facilities lack computers and internet connectivity is not assured, conditions not well suited for traditional EMR platforms.
Streamline’s EMR platform tackles these challenges through different innovative approaches. 1) It integrates an early key warning system and safety prompts based on WHO clinical guidelines to help clinicians make decisions and avoid costly errors that could arise from fatigue. 2) Its innovative business model includes payment plans for the supply of hardware to facilities that don’t yet have the computers to take up their EMR. This enables facilities to comply with government requirements for all health facilities in Uganda to share data with the government for its national health management information system.
The Streamline Health team first heard about Villgro Africa in late 2019 following a call for applications targeting hardware innovations in East Africa. Though it didn’t meet the criteria for the call, the Streamline team opted to apply given the offer for a $20,000 grant and technical support. The team convinced CEO Samuel Mugisha that they had nothing to lose and he agreed to take the chance. It paid off. Though Villgro Africa makes targeted calls, incubation applications are received all year round through the website. After about three months of diligence, Streamline was included into the Villgro Africa portfolio.
Though Streamline was not offered funding, incubation services were much needed. The business was growing and faced with competing priorities. It needed capital but the team had no experience in fundraising or engaging with investors, it also needed more customers but lacked the staff, business development skills, and tools to grow its customer base. Besides, daily demands left no time for the team to plan and make future projections. Streamline was facing the same kinds of challenges faced by most startups.
The Villgro Africa incubation program is specifically designed to address the needs of early-stage enterprises in the health and life sciences sectors. It provides customized incubation services tailored to each company’s needs, as opposed to a pre-determined curriculum of topics or support areas. Villgro Africa’s support is structured around the needs expressed by the entrepreneur and, the key issues identified during the onboarding process. As Villgro Africa is also an impact investor, onboarding includes a detailed diligence process that looks into all the aspects of the business.
Following onboarding, Villgro Africa has provided the following support to help Streamline address it challenges:
The Villgro Africa program typically takes two years. However, based on a company’s traction this duration can be extended for a further year or two to ensure the business is sustainable. Most companies receive support until they have raised Series-A funding. The next phase of support to Streamline will focus on investment readiness, investor matching, and tracking of impact metrics.
COVID19 was a good demonstration of why the work we are doing is important. For Kenya like most of Africa we typically inject over 90% of all the medical devices that we use are diagnostics, this puts us at a major risk.
When we realised this was a global challenge, our normal suppliers whether for PPE’s or diagnostics tests and in this case the vaccines, majorly produced for their own population first, what has been known as vaccine nationalism. In a situation like this with no capacity, you are at the mercy of those who have the ability to produce.
Being able to build capacity for Africa so that Africa is not always behind is important. The last global pandemic we had was HIV, it took us 10 years from when the ARVs had been launched for ARVs to be readily available in africa. Fortunately we now have COVAX which is trying to address that.
The best thing we can do now is what South Africa is doing so that companies can licence countries with capacity to manufacture vaccines so that they can start producing for populations within the region. Kenya currently does not have that capacity. We can only receive 1M one of the reasons we are not doing sufficient testing and contact tracing is because of the limited capacity.
COVID has been a good eye-opener to the fact that local manufacturing and innovation is important and we need to continue building on that capacity so that the lessons from hiv and the innovation gap can be addressed.