Villgro Kenya portfolio company Ilara Health won 1st runners up of the Sankalp Africa Awards 2020.
Led by Emilian Popa, Ilara Health provides affordable, tech-powered medical diagnostics & essential tests to patients & providers across peri-urban Sub Saharan Africa who are currently unable to access these basic life-saving tools.
The company sources for quality affordable diagnostics and leases them as a bundle to peri-urban and rural clinics. This serves as a source of revenue for them. For the leasing model, the clinics can choose to go for the subscription or pay-per-test option.
"With just a $500 (51,830 KES) deposit, doctors can more than double their daily revenue with our diagnostics bundle as against spending $5,000 (518,300 KES) on a traditional lab device or $25,000+ (2,591,500 KES) for a standard ultrasound device," says Emilian in a previous interview
Their innovative service model helps bridge the gap between affordable diagnostics and low resource clinics. Apart from providing access to medical equipment, they train on how to use these devices, which comes with insurance cover, at no additional cost.
Beyond helping clinics in the country digitize their records, the startup is also working on the possibility of allowing them to exchange medical records, with the approval of patients, via SMS.
This year Agrocenta from Ghana clinched 1st place and Riby from Nigeria secured the 2nd runners up. The Sankalp Africa Awards supports emerging high-impact African SMEs through a rigorous program that sources scalable businesses across six impact sectors and showcases them to leading investors.