The firm said on  April 11 that it was assessing the future demand for Covid-19 vaccines. Moderna’s decision comes after questions over delays in acquiring land for the project in a special economic zone on the outskirts of Nairobi, the country’s capital. 

The company said it has not received vaccine orders from Africa since 2022 and has seen orders worth over $1 billion cancelled as risks associated with the virus wane. 

“Given this, and in alignment with our strategic planning, Moderna believes it is prudent to pause its efforts to build an mRNA manufacturing facility in Kenya. This approach will allow Moderna to better align its infrastructure investments with the evolving healthcare needs and vaccine demand in Africa,” the company said in a statement on Thursday.

Moderna has been working on several other vaccines based on mRNA technology, including cancer, shingles, and HIV. It recently announced a breakthrough in the development of a vaccine for cancer.

The company’s move is a blow to President William Ruto, who, since coming to power, has been courting foreign firms to drive his manufacturing agenda. In 2023, the Moderna deal accounted for the largest portion of Kenya’s $861 million in foreign direct investments (FDI).  

The facility, which was to be Moderna’s first manufacturing plant in Africa, was expected to position Kenya as a pharmaceutical and vaccines hub in the region with a capacity to produce 500 million doses annually.

Determined to prevent loss of life through childbirth in a country with one of the highest rates of maternal death in the world, this paediatrician went online to help pregnant women. The result? “Ice cream births”.

“If we have science that can tell you precisely what your blood pressure is, or how much fuel you have in your tank, or exactly what your pulse is, why do we not have something that’ll tell you exactly how much blood a woman has lost in childbirth?” asked maternal health specialist, Dr Idara Umoette, indignantly.

She was speaking from the rooms in which she runs her practice – and a fast-growing online support group for women preparing to give birth.

Umoette recently gained online notoriety for her digital pre-natal courses and their results – what women in her WhatsApp and Telegram groups have begun calling “ice-cream births”, referring to natural births that go well. Which is why I found myself in her rooms.

Somehow, the online term “ice cream births” had passed me by. Not surprising, perhaps, given the incongruous, even outrageous nature of such a term. But when a friend told me I “had” to take a course when I was pregnant, I took note. And when the opportunity arose to find out more, for a story, I jumped at it.

Nearly 20% of all global maternal deaths occur in Nigeria. Between 2005 and 2015, some 600,000 women lost their lives during or as a result of childbirth. A lot of that has to do with the low level of doctors in the country.

The Nigerian Medical Association states that there are only 40,000 doctors for an estimated population of 196 million. The latest data from the World Health Organization (WHO) reveals that Nigeria’s physician-to-patient ratio is four doctors per 10,000 patients, and patients often wait hours to be seen. That wait can be too long for women suffering from internal bleeding after childbirth.

Which is where Umoette and her “ice cream births” comes in.

When the medical doctor of 17 years experienced her own internal bleeding for a year – thanks to a tumour that was removed – she came to understand, very personally and for the first time, the thin line between life and death.

“The fragility of life really hit home,” she said.

The experience resonated sharply with what she had been seeing around her on a regular basis as a General Practitioner and public maternal health specialist – women dying during childbirth. As a doctor and as a woman, she said, she couldn’t bear the fact that women continued to lose their lives, often due to blood loss.

She realised she had to act.

Her first initiative was an audio-visual tool to help measure blood levels (specifically, PCV, or, Packed Cell Volume in the blood). A colour-coded, digital tool was designed to be easy to use and after presenting the idea to the Niger Delta Development Commission, she was given the nod to conduct a pilot in nine states. The tool has since been distributed to pregnant women through partners such as the Medical Women’s Association of Nigeria and the Office of the First Lady, in Benue State.

But Umoette quickly realised that this wasn’t enough. She could, she felt, help decrease mortality rates and improve the chances of successful childbirth by educating more women.

So, in August 2020 she started giving online prenatal advice. She called her service BirthSafe.

To get started, Umoette dug deep into her early training experiences. As a junior doctor in a paediatric posting at the University of Uyo Teaching Hospital in Akwa Ibom State in southern Nigeria, Umoette had dedicated herself to the well-being of neonatal babies, safeguarding them from risks in the weeks and months following childbirth. To do this, she set up an initiative to ensure no child was left behind in receiving medication – by educating mothers.

“I would always support initiatives that encouraged mothers to prioritise the availability of necessary medications for their babies. Throughout my time there, I never encountered a single instance where a baby’s life was lost,” she recalled.

Through her Instagram posts, Umoette now offered a similarly thorough program, teaching pregnant women how to prevent problems during pregnancy and during childbirth. In October 2022, she organised the first webinar on Zoom for her WhatsApp community.

The service has since grown to provide virtual consulting sessions via digital platforms such as Zoom, Telegram, YouTube and Instagram, with group meetings on WhatsApp. She has a team of professionals who help and who have also signed partnerships with service providers in the maternity sector to increase offerings to women.

The antenatal classes focus on three key “protocols”; a PVC Protocol focusing on nutrition – to ensure sufficient iron and other elements in the blood to maintain the correct PCV levels and to help with dilation during the birth; an NIL Protocol (meaning no complications) focusing on exercise to improve blood circulation and agility; and a Birth Recovery Protocol, focusing on how to recognise symptoms requiring immediate first aid, or professional medical assistance in the postpartum period, for both caesarean and natural births.

“This runs for 42 days from the time a woman gives birth, any number of things can occur that could result in either injury or loss of life to the woman. The two most common in our environment are hypertensive events and excess bleeding,” Umoette explained.

By establishing dedicated, digital antenatal care support groups on social media, Umoette was able to start improving the pregnancy experiences of women.

“When the doctor told me I was 3cm dilated, I already knew what he meant and the next step to take. Being a member of the BirthSafe group had equipped me with adequate knowledge and I knew I would have a safe delivery. With that knowledge, I began the drills just as instructed by our Doctor Idara. It was almost like I could hear her voice in my head giving me instructions,” said Praise Hans, a mother and midwifery nurse who gave birth to a baby girl on April 5, 2023.

Even with her own knowledge, Hans sought out BirthSafe because of the success stories she had encountered.

“As a midwife who has knowledge of pregnancy, childbirth and delivery, I can say that I learnt a lot more things from Dr Idara’s teaching in our group… the tips she gives us that make pregnancy life stress-free,” she disclosed.

Umoette encourages her social media followers to use easy, local solutions to improve the pregnancy and childbirth experience.

“I also teach women how to significantly raise their blood levels and avoid anaemia in pregnancy and childbirth using easy, local solutions,” she said.

Preye Eghove, who gave birth to her first child in February 2023, increased her Packed Cell Volume after following advice from Umoette’s online sessions.

“When I checked my PCV at a lab after being advised by Dr. Umoette, the lab attendant attested to the fact that my PCV was low. She wanted to prescribe a blood booster drug for me. With the therapy from BirthSafe group, it took me one month to boost my PCV from 32% to 47%,” Eghove said.

While the growth of online medical advice, support and diagnostic services has grown phenomenally across Africa in the past few years, a number of health specialists warn that online services should always be carefully researched by users and that they should be run by qualified medical personnel.

“Even though the efforts are laudable, there must be a kind of way to check the activities of mobile health support groups to avoid misuse and misleading,” wrote Abuja-based healthcare practitioner, Dr. Ebenizer Okoh.

Others are more encouraging.

“If properly managed by a qualified doctor, this is a good solution that will reduce our work and boost our productivity because the health care system in Nigeria is strained and the exodus of doctors out of Nigeria is not helping. So this reduces the pressure on us,” responded Dr Ralu Okeke a medical doctor at Victoria Memorial in Jos, going on to explain that online services could also proffer quick responses to issues so that pregnant women need not wait until the next antenatal appointment.

Umoette’s Instagram followers have since increased to almost 20,000. After growing her social media presence to include Telegram, and with women following her from a Web App is also in the works. She has also started charging for the full service, including a follow-up “package” with regular check-ins. Sign-up costs some 7,000 naira (around US$10).

More importantly, a number of women have reported easier-than-expected births, which is where the “ice-cream birth” moniker comes in.

“It started in 2023 in a WhatsApp group and moved to Instagram. The term is now used generously in the blue testimonials posts on our page,” explained Umoette.

“I want more women to give birth safely… Testimonies from my BirthSafe mothers’ experiences make me feel fulfilled every night,” Umoette said.

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Smack in the center of Victoria Island, Lagos, the One Wellness Centre’s (OWC) reception is warm, with people in green scrubs greeting visitors with smiles. The visitors have a variety of needs related to fertility and reproduction. Some are parents who need help getting pregnant, and some are here to freeze their eggs or sperm until they are ready to have kids. Some women are here to treat or prevent reproductive problems like ovarian cysts. Others come for cosmetic procedures that can improve their sexual health and pleasure. Chibuki Aigbe,  the practice manager at OWC, took us on a tour of the facility.

We checked out the consultation rooms, a surgery, a pharmacy, offices, and an embryology lab. Each of these rooms is named after different types of lotus flowers. 

“The lotus often takes the shapes of the vulva and womb,” Aigbe told us. “It symbolises different aspects of female sexuality, and that is why we have named these rooms after its various species.”  

After the tour, we sat down with a specialist at the centre, Jean Nassar, a specialist with over 18 years of experience in obstetrics and in vitro fertilization (IVF), who’s also head of the IVF unit at St George’s Hospital University Medical Centre in Lebanon. We talked about the OWC’s techniques, technologies, and overarching mission: their passion for helping women have babies. 

You have over 18 years of experience in fertility and gynecology. My first question would be, why did you choose to practise in Nigeria? 

I first visited Nigeria two years ago and saw many health centres. I found a significant gap in the medical field here, especially concerning fertility, with its new techniques and technologies. And I wanted to bring all my expertise and the latest technology here to Nigeria to help people have kids.

What is  One Wellness Centre’s mission, and what services do you offer? Why is it called a wellness centre, as opposed to a hospital or a clinic?

We call it a wellness centre because, even though we are presently dealing with fertility, we also plan to open an aesthetic clinic. So, it’s not just a fertility clinic. 

It’s not just women’s health; it’s everything concerning women’s health and aesthetics. We have a widely experienced team (including myself), with specialists in IVF, high-risk maternal medicine, and foetal medicine. Dr Joe and I both have experience in Europe and Lebanon. Our embryologist, Dr Pamela Bazi, came from abroad as well. We used to work together and have had promising results, so we wanted to replicate that here in Nigeria. We’ve brought all our knowledge, new techniques, and technology concerning fertility. These include services like ovarian PRP [platelet-rich plasma] or ovarian rejuvenation. The ovarian PRP is a unique and promising technique that helps [older] women before 50 have babies. It’s a new challenge, and we hope to continue having great and favourable results. 

I’ve noticed that in Nigeria, women seek help at an older age than the average in the world. We have a lot of women in their early to mid-40s just seeking fertility help for the first time. Age is critical in fertility, so that’s usually a challenge because sometimes we have to offer a boost before starting the IVF or the fertility treatment, so they can have their baby even at an older age. 

Tell us a bit about the technology that you use to help these women.

We have the latest manipulators and incubators. Everything is very new and up-to-date, including the software. But what is exciting is the PRP, the ovarian PRP, which is ovarian rejuvenation. The way it works is that we take blood from the patient, and we take the plasma from it. Plasma is rich in cytokines and growth factors, so we inject both ovaries with this product. This helps stimulate the ovaries again to have new follicles, better quality follicles, and better eggs. This procedure increases the chances of the woman having a baby.

Does this work for women who are past menopause? 

We haven’t tried it on women who are past menopause, but it can work for perimenopausal women. It’s also not just about fertility; it also works for menopausal symptoms like vaginal atrophy, where a perimenopausal woman might be experiencing symptoms like a dry or atrophic vagina, for instance. We perform vaginal PRP on the intimate area to restore normal sexual feelings and activity.

How do you ensure the security and privacy of your patients’ data, considering the sensitive nature of these treatments?

It’s very important that patients’ files are handled discreetly, so all the files are kept behind locked doors. These are physical files, but they’re also backed up online. And because of how sensitive the embryos are, our embryology lab is always locked and passcode-protected. Only the embryologist has the code, and nobody else is allowed to access it. 

What steps do you take to create a supportive and empathetic environment for women with secure health?

Given how sensitive fertility is as a subject, we handle every part of the consultation with care; we’re very careful with how we talk to the patients. So we try to provide support for her psychologically as well because the patient’s state of mind is also important in this difficult journey and can affect the results. 

That’s interesting. How so?

Psychology is essential because if the patient secretes oxidative stress inside their body, it can affect the egg quality and implantation of the embryo. And this is a fact that has been proven through studies. I’ll give you an example: a woman can travel and not have her period for 10 or 15 days or might get her period twice per month just because she’s in a new place or has a stressful event in her life. It’s the same way stress can affect the chances of having a baby or even responding well to medication.

But back to how we provide care and support: we try to prepare the patient for negative results. Even though our goal is always to have positive results, it’s not always 100% successful. So, we prepare her for the possibility of negative results, after which she can either return for another cycle or continue living her life normally.

What’s the success or failure rate?

The success rate depends mainly on the age of the patient. On average, it’s more than 50%, but it depends on the age of the patient. It’s on a case-by-case basis. 

Can you share any success stories or testimonials that highlight the positive impact of OWC on patients’ lives?

We had a patient who was about 46 or 47 years old who did PRP here. She got pregnant spontaneously after the procedure, not even by doing IVF. So that’s why our work here is important. 

We saw an andrology lab during our tour. Do you also work with men? 

My work with men is mainly in andrology. So if there’s any sperm problem or any psychological issue with the husband or the male partner, I work on it with them and try to correct any sperm abnormalities. My work with male patients stops at surgery. They’re usually referred to other specialists if they need any form of surgery. 

Have you encountered any cultural challenges with patients here that you don’t encounter in your other countries?

The main issue here is that patients don’t seek help early. Typically, patients should seek help after one year of regular unprotected intercourse without conception, but that’s not the case here. They often come here after five, 10 or 15 years. They don’t even accept treatment after one or two years, but those few years sometimes make all the difference in their chances of having a baby. 

How does OWC stay updated with the latest developments in fertility and wellness research? Are there any ongoing research projects or collaborations?

I usually attend a monthly or bi-monthly medical conference in Europe. The last was held in July in Copenhagen, Denmark. The European Committee had the biggest conference in Europe. I also attend all the medical conferences concerning fertility around the world. 

As technology continues to evolve, how do you see it shaping the landscape of women’s fertility? For instance, do you think there’s a place for AI in the industry? 

At the conference in Denmark in July, for the first time, we talked about AI and IVF. The future is promising, as AI will be able to choose the best embryo to be transferred to a woman. And I think we will be there very soon, maybe within the next one or two years. It will replace many of the technologies used to select the best embryos. Usually, there’s no clear answer as to which embryos to transfer. With AI, we’ll have an answer. 

That’s exciting. What other emerging technologies do you think will be useful in the industry?

It’s just AI for now, and I’m very excited about it. 

How accessible do you think your services are, especially given the economic situation here?

We try to give some discounts or sometimes free consultations. It depends on the case. For instance, if a patient tries IVF for the second time, we give them a discount. 

Do you think AI can make your work or the procedure cheaper for people? 

I don’t think so because AI won’t replace human expertise regarding surgery or [egg] retrieval. 

Patent and proprietary medicine vendors (PPMVs) are known as individuals without formal pharmacy training who sell orthodox pharmaceutical products on a retail basis for profit. They are often the primary healthcare providers for a significant portion of the Nigerian population, especially in rural areas where access to formal healthcare facilities is limited. These vendors offer various services, including treatment for malaria and diarrhea and family planning services.

There are a number of challenges facing PPMVs. However, given the informal nature of their business, limited access to credit remains one of the most pressing issues. Financial institutions often hesitate to extend credit to PPMVs due to perceived risks, lack of collateral, and limited credit histories, hindering their ability to expand their businesses and invest in essential resources.

Charity Ukwo Abah, deputy director of the enterprise development and promotion department at Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN), emphasized the significance of access to sustainable financing schemes for PPMVs to expand their businesses and offer a wider range of quality medications. 

“Empowering PPMVs with access to credit financing is essential for their growth and ability to provide improved healthcare services to the communities they serve. This will lead to better healthcare outcomes for Nigerians, especially those in underserved areas,“ Mrs Abah said during a TechCabal Live event held in partnership with Solina Group that discussed the role of technology in enhancing access to credit for PPMVs. The event had in attendance key stakeholders in the health sector interested in strengthening health inclusion in Nigeria.

“PPMVs play a critical role in delivering healthcare services, but their effectiveness is hampered by challenges such as counterfeit medications and lack of clear regulatory frameworks, Emeka Okafor, project director at IntregratE, said. “By working together with regulatory bodies and pharmaceutical companies, we can strengthen PPMVs’ capabilities and enhance access to quality healthcare for all citizens,” he added. He also highlighted the need for improved regulation and collaborations with pharmaceutical companies to build a more robust and inclusive healthcare system.

According to industry leaders, it is crucial for financial institutions to integrate technology in providing credit to PPMVs.  Technology can be used to build a digital credit scoring system specifically for PPMVs. This will provide access to relevant data such as sales performance, customer feedback, and inventory which will help financial institutions better assess the creditworthiness of these vendors.

This data-driven approach will enable lenders to make informed decisions, reducing perceived risks and facilitating access to much-needed financing. This, in turn, will empower PPMVs to expand their businesses and improve healthcare services nationwide.

According to healthcare consulting firm Salient Advisory’s “Innovations in Digitizing Health Supply Chains” in Africa report, 78% of all healthtech startups and innovators in the southern Africa region are based in South Africa.

The report, whose supporting study was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, features almost 350 innovators in the health supply chain in Africa. It highlights the significant increase in partnerships between governments and health tech supply chain innovators across the continent.

Some more stats on the state of healthtech innovation in the region are as follows:

• 33% of the companies in the region were founded in the last two years.
• 12% of the companies were solely founded by women.
• 10% of the companies have a mixed-gender founding team.
• $7.3M in external funding has been raised by innovators in the region.
• 12% of companies operate in more than one country, some operating beyond Southern Africa.
• 7% of innovators have established government partnerships in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Malawi.

Across the continent, Plug N Play Ventures and Launch Africa cut the most equity and debt cheques for healthtech innovators. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google’s Black Founders Fund, on the other hand, have provided the highest number of grants. Additionally, innovators headquartered outside the continent have also raised 83% of total funding ever reported, with large e-commerce giants and medical drone delivery operators capturing the bulk of external investment. 

Similarly, gender financing gaps are also evident as companies founded solely by women make up 8% of all startups but have received only 2% of all reported funds overall time. Lack of access to equity financing has resulted in women-led companies relying more heavily on debt and grants.

“African health innovators have demonstrated an impressive ability to utilise technology for the optimisation of supply chain solutions and the improvement of access to medicines. We are delighted to witness this progress, particularly as it coincides with an increase in government partnerships, which will advance positive health outcomes,” said Hany Abdallah, senior program officer, supply chain systems at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Specialised health facilitator My 1Health has launched its global platform to connect patients to worldwide healthcare services. The platform was created by merging My 1Health (formerly MyHealth Africa) and International Medical Treatment. The firm, which raised $1 million in December 2022, operates in several African countries, including Nigeria and Egypt, and has plans to launch in new markets. In total, My 1Health has a presence in 14 territories. Some of its users also receive medical attention from outside Africa, in countries such as England and Turkey.

In a conversation with TechCabal, the CEO of My 1Health, Ryan Marincowitz, revealed that following their December 2022 funding round, the startup is looking to expand its reach to Ethiopia and South Sudan. Marincowitz explained that the startup aims to transform how patients access specialised healthcare using tech and strategic partnerships. 

“By merging MyHealth Africa and International Medical Treatment, we’ve curated a unified platform that combines the best of both worlds. We’re also announcing our expansion into Ethiopia and South Sudan, an important step towards our mission of improving access to specialised healthcare services across the region,” Marincowitz said.

How My 1Health operates and earns revenue 

Founded in 2018, MyHealth, now My 1Health, has been operating in this new tech-based medical facilitation field from its Nairobi office. If an individual needs specialised healthcare services, they can access My 1Health’s platform through a smartphone app or a web interface. The onboarding process is straightforward, but the team at the startup tries to help new users as much as they can.

For example, if a person has been diagnosed with cancer or any other serious illness that needs expert attention, the team at My 1Health will connect them with two or three medical doctors for a second opinion. Once a diagnosis has been established, the patient can seek further medical care from a facility of choice, usually outside the country.

If a patient chooses to travel for medical attention, My 1Health facilitates their travel, including visa applications and even insurance correspondence with their provider.

Marincowitz told TechCabal they receive a facilitation fee from the hospitals or medical centres they collaborate with. Patients can also choose to connect directly with hospitals at no extra cost.

“We work with leading hospitals, clinics and specialists across Africa and worldwide. We receive a coordination or facilitation fee for each patient we assist. The cost for the patient is either the same as if they are to visit the medical facility directly, or in some cases, it is actually cheaper if the patient goes through us as we can negotiate a discount,” he explained. 

The startup has assisted more than 35,000 patients in accessing specialised healthcare services. Currently, it is aiding over 1,200 patients each month, and its monthly patient visits exhibited an average growth rate of 11% throughout 2022.

My 1Health forms a part of a growing crop of startups using tech to tackle the dearth of healthcare services in Africa. With their latest funding round and what seems like a steady focus, it is no doubt a startup to watch. It will be interesting to observe how healthtech startups  improve access to healthcare by using tech and strategic partnerships to connect patients with doctors and hospitals worldwide, regardless of their location or insurance status.

When Helium Health started digitizing electronic medical records (EMR) in Nigeria, Adegoke Olubusi, the CEO, discovered a market gap. Private health facilities, despite being the first point of call for many Nigerians, lacked access to external funding. More than half of the private healthcare facilities in Nigeria lacked access to external financing, according to data from Pharmaccess. 

“We started to understand more deeply the gap that exists with healthcare financing, but it became more apparent to us how heavy and how wide of a gap this is. And we wanted to build a solution that could bridge that,” Olubusi told TechCabal. In 2020, Olubusi and his team launched HeliumCredit to give hospitals, clinics, pharmacies and diagnostics centers loans to buy medical equipment and medication and facilitate business expansions. 

Using loans to scale is a critical part of any business strategy. Africa has a $66 billion health financing deficit, and this is mostly due to the lack of data. Investors and donors often rely on data-driven assessments to determine the impact and effectiveness of their contributions. Helium Health bridges the data gap by enrolling hospitals on HeliumOS—its core product which digitises electronic medical records. The EMR gathers information about the hospital’s finances and other metrics, which HeliumCredit uses to decide whether a hospital can receive a loan.

“With HeliumOS, we can see that there is this financing issue, and we saw that the lenders wanted to lend, and we said, how can we use this technology in the data system to digitize the end-to-end process?” Olubusi told TechCabal.

How it works

HeliumCredit provides easy access to credit for hospitals and healthcare institutions in an entirely digital process. Intending applicants apply for financing via HeliumCredit’s website and receive a disbursement of funds within 48 hours of approval. The average loan size is about  ₦14m. Helium Health deploys loans through the Helium Wallet feature. The loan can then be repaid over a 12-to-24-month period.

For hospitals already enrolled on HeliumOS, Helium Health combines their existing data with third-party data from the banks. “So everything from their operations, to their inventory, to their stock, to their invoices and how it’s invoiced. Who pays and when they pay, and how they pay, or their insurance and their insurance claims,” Olubusi said, enumerating the type of data they typically gather.  “So, when it comes to financial and operational data, there’s a lot of critical information that is already within the system. And that is what supports the decision and process.”

“For example, if a healthcare facility requests a loan of ₦50 million, we decide if the facility can pay back the loan based on the data supplied. So we might decide to give the user a ₦5 million loan or the same ₦50 million loan they requested based on the repayment capacity we derive from the data provided,” he added.

According to Olubusi, Helium Credit has disbursed loans worth $5 million to hundreds of facilities. “These loans have been critical to these healthcare facilities in acquiring medical equipment, scaling their operations, better quality of care, attracting more experienced talent, and restocking their inventory.” Olubusi claims that 70-80% of the healthcare facilities that obtained loans from HeliumCredit have returned to obtain more loans. Despite the risky nature of the credit-financing model, the majority of HeliumCredit’s clients do not default on their loans according to Olubusi. “In cases where healthcare facilities default on the payment of loans, we will offer a full cycle of monitoring of the facility and provide support to them: whether it is capacity development through education or financial training,” he said. 

Driving health tech innovation in Africa

Helium Health secured a $30 million in investment from a Series B funding round in June this year. The funding round will be used to expand the reach of HeliumCredit. While interest in healthtech startup funding spiked in 2023—per data from The Big Deal— health tech startups witnessed a 7% year-on-year growth in funding, showing that credit financing is still in the nascent stage on the continent.

The YC-backed healthtech startup claims to be the widest-reaching EMR platform in West Africa, used across 230 facilities to care for over 1 million African patients. 

Helium Health has great plans for expansion. According to the CEO, the company is set to launch HeliumCredit in Kenya in 2024 and will also increase its lending portfolio to 1,000 healthcare facilities by 2024, in partnership with the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC).

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have become ingrained in our daily routines, allowing us to connect with others, share stories, and express ourselves. However, regular usage of social media can also lead to increased rates of anxiety and depression, particularly in young people.

But the internet transcends this dichotomy, and can also offer resources and digital support to better understand mental health conditions and get help for them. 

A closer look at the connection between our digital lives, and our mental health can reveal a number of ways to make the most of the resources digital support offers to nurture our mental well-being.

Understanding digital support

Digital support for mental health comprises a range of resources and platforms that leverage technology to provide assistance for mental health issues. This includes concept online therapy platforms, virtual communities, chatbots, videos, and articles.

Digital support for mental health provides some sort of anonymity, allowing individuals to seek help without the fear of being judged. It also facilitates connections with diverse support networks, enabling individuals to connect with others who understand and share similar experiences. Additionally, with round-the-clock availability, digital support for mental health ensures that individuals can always access help when they need it. 

Although digital mental health support isn’t a replacement for traditional therapy, it combines technology and human interaction to provide accessible, informative, and practical assistance to individuals seeking mental health help.

The impact of social media on mental health

Nigeria’s mental health system faces numerous challenges and gaps, especially in local communities. There is a lack of awareness and understanding, which leads to stigma and discrimination. This worsens existing issues and creates barriers to accessing quality care. Statistics show that 80% of Nigerians with mental health needs cannot access care due to societal attitudes toward mental illness and a lack of appropriate resources, facilities, and mental health staff.

Hauwa Ojeifo, a certified integrative mental health coach and activist, and the founder of She Writes Woman and Safe Place Nigeria shed some light on the challenges surrounding the utilisation of social media for mental health support and interventions. In a conversation with TechCabal, she explained that not everyone with a mobile device has access to digital spaces. “We have to recognise that whilst mobile phone penetration in Nigeria can seem quite high, internet penetration is not as high as we think,” she told TechCabal.

“So as much as we are using social media or digital media as opportunities to spread mental health awareness, to provide accurate information and knowledge around mental health, and to provide some sort of first aid, we have to recognise that we’re actually not reaching the furthest behind first. We’re not reaching, perhaps most of the grassroots, and the people who may not actually have the privilege, access, or orientation to be able to navigate the digital space,” Ojeifo concluded.

Nonye Ukwuoma, a licensed clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, and founder and lead consultant at 360 Psyche, believes that social media can also be used to spread misinformation about mental health as well as foster mental health challenges. “Social media can promote misinformation about mental health and encourage unreliable sources. Social media creates its own mental health challenge such as cyberbullying, even within the space where people come to seek support. I have seen spaces on social media that should be considered ‘safe’, but they didn’t look safe because the suggestions offered as support can be outrightly or silently unhealthy for mental health,” Ukwuoma explained.

However, Ojeifo is optimistic about the support digital access provides for individuals facing mental health challenges. She adds that the access plays a crucial role in bridging gaps. “I would say there’s been a lot of upsides to digital support, it means that we don’t have to be in physical proximity to mental health support before we can access it, and we can also get a network of community. And I think that’s something that is largely underestimated in the mental health recovery process, especially on this side of the world,” she said. “The digital space offers us an opportunity to connect with people just like us going through similar challenges, but also see what is working for other people and try to use that for ourselves. Having these sorts of interventions plug the gaps is very, very helpful in moving the needle forward.”

Sharing in Ojeifo’s optimism about digital support, Ukwuoma believes that face-to-face interaction isn’t always necessary, and digital support methods will  allow professionals to prioritise urgent mental health needs and ultimately lead to improved outcomes for clients. “We are a global village and one of the things we now know is that we do not have to see face-to-face. When I started practising, it seemed almost alien that we would help a client when they were not physically present.” she said. “This sometimes stretches a treatment plan that may eventually affect the prognosis. Currently, most organisations including 360 Psyche, encourage and prioritise digital support. Clients get support via phone calls, emails, chats, and video calls, among others. This gives time to focus on more pressing mental health needs, which translates to a better prognosis for clients.”

Arinze, an active participant in an online mental health awareness community called Omhac, shared his perspectives about the positive impact of digital platforms and how Omhac has enriched his understanding of mental health. In joining the online community, his intention was to gain more knowledge on mental health. “I find it very easy to connect and interact with people in the group, and I’ve increased my knowledge of mental health. I’ve learned more about different techniques when combating mental health illnesses, and I have a general knowledge about how some of these things affect our day-to-day lives and the people that are close to us,” Arinze said.

He also expressed how helpful and supportive the online community has been. “I find their Twitter spaces very, very helpful. They host it once a month and they invite other speakers to come to share their thoughts or educate us further on things that relate to mental health. The group is very heavy on teamwork, everybody always wants to help in one way or another, and it has helped me out with my anxiety. I now know better in dealing with it and how not to let it overwhelm me sometimes. I would 100% recommend it to people who are looking for online mental health support groups because it is easy to access and it is very, very enlightening.”

Exploring and embracing digital support

According to Ojeifo, more people need to embrace the idea of digital support, due to the absence of community-based mental health services in Nigeria and the limited focus on mental health at the national level. “We’re in Nigeria, where some statistics show that there are just 300 psychiatrists, in a population of over 200 million Nigerians. So you can see that that is a stark statistic. That is data that is probably not going to close in another 10 to 20 years,” she said. “We’re looking at a country where there is barely any sort of community-based mental health care services that can reach the population of the grassroots, where mental health is not particularly yet at the forefront of the healthcare agenda, public health agenda, disability agenda, or even orientation agenda in the country. And so what that means is that, more often than not, or more likely than not, you would need to engage with the support that is not provided by the system itself. That is state-owned facilities and things like that.”

Ukwuoma echoed her sentiments promoting digital support for mental health, citing the convenience and sense of belonging that digital support offers as selling points. “More people should embrace digital support as it provides individuals with the opportunity to seek support and information from the comfort of their own homes, at any time that is convenient for them. Online communities, forums, and support groups provide a sense of belonging and support, allowing individuals to share their stories, exchange advice, and find solace in knowing they are not alone. A part of our brain that promotes wellness is activated when we know we are not alone,” Ukwuoma explained. 

Ojeifo believes that a significant contributor to the success of her organisation, She Writes Woman, is the fact that it is composed of individuals who have personally experienced mental health conditions. “I believe the one thing that we’ve done over the years, something that works great for us is first, the fact that we are an organisation of people with mental health conditions,” Ojeifo said.

“I believe one of the things that make digital platforms trustworthy and makes people engage with them perhaps a bit more closely than others, is knowing that the people on the other side are people like me. And for us, that has been a distinguishing factor. It’s recognising that people know that, oh, my therapist might also be somebody who lives with a mental health condition, or at least I know this organisation speaks from the point of view of people like me.” she added.

Ukwuoma also emphasised the significance of digital support platforms having a trained professional to monitor and provide streamlined support. “It’s important to have a monitoring person or persons. People get more streamlined support when the support is monitored by a person trained in mental health and emotional support. It’s important to set enforceable boundaries and there should be an opportunity for online members to seek help from a licensed professional through secure and private channels digitally. Not all forms of help can be gotten from online communities and 24/7 online support is important because it offers people an opportunity to get help promptly,” she explained.

Ojeifo addressed the potential negative impact of social media on mental health and gave strategies or guidelines that individuals can follow to navigate these challenges. She suggests that it is essential for individuals to recognize and acknowledge that they are not superior to the tools they use, as it sets the foundation for making necessary adjustments. “Whether we like it or not, there are immense negative effects of social media. In the science of social media, there’s a psychology to it. It’s understanding human behaviour, understanding buyer behaviour, understanding consumer economics and consumer psychology,” she told TechCabal.

“I generally tell people, the first thing to do is to acknowledge that we’re not more powerful than these tools because that also sets the ground for how we can begin to adjust. We have a certain kind of internal arrogance when we think we’re more powerful than the tools. Yes, they are just tools and it depends on how you use them, but it’s also recognising that these tools have been carefully curated, to actually pick on our flaws as human beings, or at least the neurobiology or neuroscience that we are all governed by,” she added.

Ukwuoma also highlighted the importance of setting firm boundaries when navigating social media. Her reasoning was that since it is not possible to control how people behave on social media, it is important to minimise the potential for cyberbullying and online harassment.  “The truth is, we really can’t dictate how people will act or react on social media, and we need to accept that. Setting boundaries helps protect your privacy and reduces the risk of cyberbullying or online harassment. Develop a critical mindset when consuming content on social media, and question the accuracy and reliability of information before accepting it as truth. Verify sources, fact-check information, and be cautious of misinformation or sensationalised content that can contribute to anxiety or fear,” she said.

Emerging trends in the mental health space

In the final stages of our discussion, Ojeifo highlighted AI and telemedicine as some technologies she found particularly promising but raised concerns about their possible negative consequences. “AI and telemedicine are two big emerging trends that we see in the space. But I am a bit more cautiously optimistic that whilst they may seem like very promising tools in the short term, I worry about the possible downsides. If the right regulations and safeguarding are not in place, and if they are governed by the same capitalist ideologies that we use to create other apps like social media apps, where we are looking at a profit over the person that is using it.“

Ukwuoma described AI-powered chatbots as interesting, highlighting her fascination with the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide emotional support. “A few years back, I watched a program where a person was receiving emotional support from a bot powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence, and I was wowed. Consistently, we have seen robots help people cope with loneliness, stress, and special educational needs, among others. While some may argue that this may outrun mental health professionals, I personally think it will help bridge treatment gaps.” she said.

“An emerging technology I find particularly interesting is the AI-powered chatbots, dedicated to emotional support. It is mind-blowing. This will help more people, while we can focus more on fewer, more time-needing situations,” Ukwuoma concluded.

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Helium Health, a Nigerian healthtech company, has secured $30 million in investment from a Series B funding round. According to Helium Health, the funding will be used to expand the reach of its fintech product, HeliumCredit. With its latest funding round, Helium Health has raised a total of $42.12 million. In 2020, the startup raised a notable $10 million during its Series A funding round.

This round of funding was led by AXA IM Alts, with participation from Capria Ventures, Angaza Capital, Anne Wojcicki (Founder of 23&Me) and Flatworld Partners. Existing investors including Global Ventures, Tencent, Ohara Pharmaceuticals, LCY Group, WTI and AAIC also participated in the round.

Founded in 2014 by Adegoke Olubusi, Tito Ovia and Dimeji Sofowora, Helium Health is focused on exploring  the role of technology in efficiently managing healthcare records in Africa.  With this latest funding, the company will expand its reach by offering healthcare providers access to credit via its fintech product, HeliumCredit.

HeliumCredit was launched in 2020 to provide hospitals, clinics, pharmacies and diagnostics centers with loans to purchase medical equipment and medication, as well as to facilitate business expansions. According to Helium Health, over $3.5 million in loans has been disbursed to about 200 healthcare facilities through HeliumCredit.

Helium Health has great plans for expansion. The company is set to launch HeliumCredit in Kenya this year and will also increase its lending portfolio to 1,000 healthcare facilities by 2024, in partnership with the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC).

“We believe in a future where good healthcare is a reality for all Africans, not just the few. We are deeply committed to supporting both private healthcare providers and public health stakeholders with finance, technology, and data to achieve that vision,” said Adegoke Olubusi, Helium Health CEO/co-founder while speaking on the funding. “We are delighted to have such seasoned healthcare investors accompany us on our journey.”

Noor Sweid, Managing Partner, Global Ventures, one of the participating investors in this round expresses confidence in Helium Health and its suite of products. “We have seen first-hand the evolution of Helium Health over the years. The leadership team has a deep understanding of Africa’s healthcare sector and knows how to build products that meet its nuanced needs,” he said. 

Helium Health says it will also continue to scale its SaaS suite for healthcare providers through HeliumOS, its Electronic Medical Records and Hospital Management Information System (EMR/HMIS) solution

Africa does not have enough healthcare personnel. So healthcare workers are expected to take care of more patients per doctor than in more developed economies. Paperwork takes up a significant portion of time on the job. Healthcare workers must take patients’ medical histories, fill out forms and update these records with time. Modern hospitals are digitising how they take these records but a computer and some software do not necessarily make the job easier. Sometimes, it takes up too much time and doctors go back to writing their notes on paper. 

One Nigerian-trained doctor and AI specialist believes that artificial intelligence can help African hospitals digitise medical records faster and save time for doctors.

Nigeria, Africa’s most populated country, needs 363,000 doctors to achieve universal healthcare coverage. But Nigeria only has 24,000 licensed medical doctors. In 2017 when Nigeria needed 237,000 doctors to meet the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recommended doctor-to-patient ratio, the country had even more— 35,000 doctors. The number of qualified medical doctors has fallen by 31.4% despite the population growing by 2.46% on average between 2017 and 2021.

As a result, too few doctors see far too many patients. Doctors in Nigeria frequently complain of burnout and being “overused and underpaid”. The story is the same across much of Africa. With approximately 3.6 million health workers in the 47 countries, the WHO estimates that Africa has a ratio of 1.55 health workers (including physicians, nurses and midwives) per 1,000 people. The recommended threshold is 4.45 healthcare workers for every 1,000 patients. By 2018, only four countries (Mauritius, Namibia, Seychelles and South Africa) had surpassed the WHO health worker-to-population ratio.

Digitising healthcare

In the early 1960s, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester in the US state of Minnesota was one of the first major healthcare centres to adopt an electronic health record (EHR) system. It was expensive and basic and could only be used to manage patient appointments and billing. Since then, electronic health record software has become much more sophisticated, allowing for detailed information about the patient’s health to be collected and processed.

EHRs are not widely used in African healthcare despite their much-talked-about benefits. Installing EHR systems and training healthcare workers to use them is expensive. It is also often blamed for the lack of adoption of EHR tools by hospitals. But there are subtler reasons. Tobi Olatunji, a University of Ibadan-trained doctor turned computer scientist, says even in hospitals where EHR systems are installed they are not always used because doctors find them cumbersome and time-consuming. Doctors may be computer literate, but “when you put a keyboard in front of people, then that’s a whole different problem that you are creating.”

So Olatunji co-founded Intron Health, a startup that uses automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology to transcribe doctors’ notes while they speak. But Intron Health did not start out with speech-to-text software. Intron Health, founded in 2019, offered a regular EHR software solution to help hospitals digitise their processes.

In 2020, as COVID-19 spread globally and healthcare workers worried that Africa’s frail healthcare system could easily be overwhelmed, Intron Health piloted its first software at a Nigerian hospital. “It was a busy hospital and they were all excited. They had electricity; we had installed a wireless network for them. Everything was great,” Olatunji recalls. “[But] the day we launched, the doctor spent 40 minutes just to type the notes for the first patient that came.”  Seeing the next patient took 50 minutes and by this time patients in the waiting room were getting visibly frustrated. If a doctor cannot see patients because they need to use clunky computer software to create or update medical records, waiting patients will be tempted to seek help elsewhere. The hospitals using Intron Health’s early software asked them if they could simplify it by replacing text boxes with checkboxes. But that was a crude solution and it meant you had to predict every possible medical situation to create a robust enough checkbox system. That was impossible.

During his days as a medical student at University College Hospital (UCH) Ibadan, Olatunji had faced a similar frustration during an anatomy course where a lecturer struggled to explain how babies pass through the birth canal with only textbook pictures and hand gestures. He felt a video lesson would be better and students could repeat the lesson as much as they needed to. Somehow he was able to convince the university to build a rudimentary learning management system with hosted animated video lessons, with funding from the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the World Bank. From then on, Olatunji’s path began to diverge from medical practice. His university asked him to help train staff from other universities, and when he graduated, he was employed by the university to build technology tools, including telesurgery tools, a patient navigation app and clinical simulation software. 

From UCH Ibadan, Olatunji made his way to the United States where he got a master’s degree in medical informatics from the University of San Francisco and another in computer science at Georgia Tech. He was employed by Enlitic, a San Francisco Bay Area company, as clinical natural language programming (NLP) scientist and researcher to help build NLP models to automate information extraction from Radiology text reports. After leaving Enlitic, he joined the Health AI team at Amazon Web Services as a machine learning scientist. He also began building software to digitise hospital records in Africa, which became Intron Health. But his first rodeo ran into a snag. Doctors in Africa who saw too many patients could not type fast enough for a digital medical record system to make an EHR installation worthwhile.

Keyboard to microphones

Drawing inspiration from speech-to-text software that Olatunji’s wife, also a doctor, used, Intron Health tested popular speech-to-text platforms and found the obvious. They all failed to transcribe African-accented pronunciations and names properly. “I tried them out myself and we realised that those things were not built for our accents. If doctors used them, it would waste too much of their time,”  Olatunji explains.

But he had worked on these types of problems so the Intron team decided to build a proprietary speech recognition platform and embed it in EHR platforms to make taking notes easier and free up valuable time for the doctors.

This was 2021 and the Intron community threw itself into sourcing for African-accented audio datasets. Intron has now built up more than 11 million voice samples from 7,000 speakers in 13 countries and more than 200 unique accents. It allows them to build automatic speech recognition software that can translate accented speech with more fidelity than Google Assistant, Siri or Alexa, for example.

When Intron onboards hospitals to its platform, it asks healthcare workers to read a short 74-word paragraph. “Most people take up to 55 seconds to dictate this and speech speed is pretty constant,” Olatunji explains. But the doctors could take as much as 5 minutes to type out the same paragraph as they pick at their keyboards, one letter at a time. With speech recognition technology that understands African accents, doctors can take notes faster and save time. According to Olatunji several hospitals in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and South Africa are now using Intron’s speech-to-text software.

Nakunta Muwasu is a medical doctor at Meridian Health Group in Nairobi, one of the hospitals using Intron Health’s software. “It makes taking short notes faster,” Muwasu tells TechCabal. But for longer records, she prefers to type on her keyboard.

Intron has produced several papers under review which it has presented at several conferences showcasing their research and product. In one of the papers co-authored by Tobi Olatunji, Tejumade Afonja and five other computer scientists, the authors show how their African-accent model outperforms the more popular speech recognition software models.

Intron is one of the African startups using artificial intelligence to deliver digital transformation. Earlier this year, InstaDeep a Tunisian-born enterprise AI company, which was founded in 2015 and raised $107 million from investors, was acquired by BioNTech for $680 million. Intron, by contrast, has only raised a family-and-friends round of $250,000 since its inception in 2019 to date. Despite this, it has managed to build and maintain the expensive infrastructure requirements for running an AI company—partly thanks to a partnership with GPU chipmaker, NVIDIA.

As part of the same partnership, the company is currently running a $5,000 award hackathon, inviting programmers to build better models using a small percentage of its training dataset.  Afri-Speech-200, the developer challenge was created in partnership with DSN, Masakhane, Lanfrica, Huggingface and Zindi to advance diversity in artificial intelligence. The lack of diversity and the potential for bias is one of the problems AI practitioners and technology regulators have had to grapple with. Intron’s ASR technology may prove to be a valuable tool for African healthcare workers, but it also highlights the work that needs to be done to ensure that AI systems are not completely blind to contexts outside developed countries where training data is abundant.

This story has been updated to correct factual errors.

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