Seven years ago, the Mulago Foundation took a bet on me and on MDaaS Global. Earlier this month, I had the privilege of showing them, in person, what that bet has built.
When I was selected as a Rainer Arnhold Fellow back in 2019, we were a small team, running a single clinic, with a big idea: that we could get critical diagnostics services to millions of underserved Nigerians.
Mulago didn't fund us because we had it all figured out (we didn't). They funded us because they believed we could.
And we have spent the last seven years relentlessly figuring out how to get diagnostics services to the people who need them most, sustainably and scalably. Through COVID, currency crises, funding winters, and everything else Nigeria throws at us.
Today, that single clinic has grown to 25 clinics across Nigeria, over 600,000 patients served, millions of diagnostic tests, and a clinical decision support system. The Mulago team got to visit 6 of those clinics on this trip, and to meet the team that makes it all work.
The point of figuring out how to scale diagnostics isn't just to build MDaaS. It's to show governments, entrepreneurs, and other operators across Africa that this work can be done and to make it easier for the next builders to do more of it.
To Kevin Starr, Kenichi Nozaki, Kristin (Gilliss) Moyer) Avery Bang and the rest of the Mulago team, thank you for coming, thank you for staying, and thank you for believing in me and my team.
