Villgro Africa is an incubator and impact investor supporting emerging healthcare businesses in Africa that is celebrating its 7th anniversary. In those 7 years, the firm has cumulatively supported 53 companies who received between USD 20,000 and USD 50,000 in seed or pre-seed funding in either grant or equity.
Portfolio companies have generated more than USD 6 million in revenue and created about 600 jobs while building solutions that have served over 4 million people.
5 in every 1000 people in Africa suffer from chronic wounds. Treatment using dressings can prolong healing time and increase cost while lack of adequate gowns leads to delays and poor surgical outcomes including loss of life.
Negus Med is an advanced wound care and theatre textiles distribution and manufacturing company that seeks to solve these problems. They have served 32000 customers and created 14 jobs.
Read: Kenya Healthcare Federation Salutes President Ruto’s Health Reform Commitments
Other portfolio companies include MamaOpe, which uses Artificial Intelligence to determine and interpret respiratory rate and lung sounds for the diagnosis of respiratory diseases, and Wekebere – a Ugandan company developing a medical device for maternal monitoring.
The World Health Organisation gives Kenya a 63% rating for health system performance. This is in alignment with data that shows that Kenya has 2.4 specialist doctors per 1000 people, 11.7 nursing staff (including midwives and associate nurses) per 10,000 people, and 2.7 health facilities per 10,000 people.
With this shortage of personnel and facilities in Kenya, innovation in the health sector will be crucial to ensuring the steady development of the sector. As such, leveraging technology and social entrepreneurship should be a priority for health sector stakeholders in Africa.
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