Medrafa founder, Ben Tesfaye did not set out to build a health technology company. He studied chemistry, spent time in pharmacy school, and eventually found himself running a group of businesses under USP Holdings, including real estate in Ethiopia. Digital health was not on his radar.
That changed when his colleague Noah put a proposal in front of him. Noah believed there was a serious problem in how prescriptions were being handled across Ethiopian pharmacies, and that technology could help address it. Ben was unconvinced. He pushed back, and for a while, the idea sat. It was only after a meeting with a technology expert that something shifted. Ben began to see what Noah had seen, and he decided to back the idea properly. Medrafa was born out of that gradual change of mind.
The problem Noah had identified was real and significant. Roughly 58 percent of prescriptions in Ethiopia contained errors, most of them stemming from illegible handwriting and the absence of any system to flag harmful drug interactions at the point of dispensing. Patients were being put at risk not through negligence, but through a lack of infrastructure that most health systems take for granted.
As Ben and his team started working through the problem, they realized that prescription errors were only one part of a much larger issue. Across Africa, health systems were deeply fragmented. Patient records did not follow people from one provider to another. Institutions could not share data. There was no shared language between systems. What looked like a pharmacy problem was really a symptom of a continent-wide gap in health information infrastructure.
Medrafa was incorporated three years ago with a clear purpose: to address that fragmentation. The company set three goals for itself. First, to reduce medical errors by standardizing how medications are recorded and dispensed. Second, to help lower healthcare costs by making systems more efficient. Third, to give patients ownership of their own health data through portable records that move with them.
The team started with pharmacies, which represent the largest single touchpoint in the healthcare ecosystem. They built a terminology server to standardize medication data, and a pharmacy inventory management system that gives pharmacists visibility into their stock and dispensing records. Medrafa also became the first company in Ethiopia to obtain a SNOMED CT license, aligning their work with internationally recognized clinical terminology standards.
The product is offered in tiers. Small, independent pharmacies can access a free version that covers the basics. A paid SaaS product serves mid-sized operators, and an enterprise offering handles more complex supply chain and data management needs. A notable early deployment was with the Ethiopian Red Cross. Today, the system runs across more than 200 pharmacies in Ethiopia, and over a million patients have received medications dispensed through the platform.
Ben talks about the prescription error rate the way someone talks about a problem that is solvable, not inevitable. His aim is to bring it down to single digits. That would require not just Medrafa’s system to spread, but a broader shift in how Ethiopia’s health sector thinks about digital infrastructure. He believes both are possible.
The longer horizon involves something more ambitious: a health information exchange layer that would allow different healthcare institutions to share data with each other, built on international standards. That work is still in development, but it points toward what Ben sees as the ultimate goal, a health data ecosystem across Africa where a patient’s information is not trapped in a single clinic or pharmacy but available wherever it is needed.
Medrafa is now part of Villgro Africa’s 2026 More Health for Africa (MHfA) cohort. For Ben, the partnership represents access to a network of investors and institutions that can help carry the company into new markets. He is looking for $1 million in funding, along with strategic partners, to support expansion across African countries and is in conversation with the Africa CDC about deploying the HIE infrastructure more broadly.
The path from a skeptical reading of Noah’s proposal to building health infrastructure used across a million patient encounters is not a straight one. But it reflects something consistent in how Ben approaches problems: carefully, with a willingness to change his mind when the evidence is there, and with a focus on building things that last.