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.