As low application of innovation and technology in the healthcare sector remains the biggest drawback in transforming delivery in Nigeria, the Private Sector Health Alliance of Nigeria (PHN), a private sector-led coalition, has unveiled $1 million Health Innovation Challenge (HIC) to address suboptimal health care.
Additionally, it aims to reduce variability in care and catalyse impact investments in critical segments that benefit the underserved in Nigeria’s 170 million populace.
With many incubation and innovation platforms in the country targeting information technology and applications in finance and commerce, none of the existing platforms currently focus on health innovation/application of technology in healthcare delivery, a development, HIC seeks to address.
This comes as less than 3 percent of the 2,400 awardees of the Youth Enterprise with Innovation in Nigeria (YouWIN) are in the health sector.
Unveiling the $1 million health challenge, Herbert Wigwe, chair, PHN Nigeria Health Innovation Marketplace (MHIM) steering committee and GMD, Access Bank, disclosed that the biggest missed opportunity in accelerating improved Nigeria’s health outcomes lies in the ability to create a health innovation marketplace to identify, spur and scale up promising health innovations that leapfrog constraints and save lives.
Wigwe noted that the private sector has to play an important role in complementing governments’ efforts to contribute to save one million lives (SOML) through innovation, advocacy and impact investments.
“We (PHN) have convened a community of practice for healthcare innovators in Nigeria. This community will leapfrog innovation through shared learning. There will be learning clusters, spin-offs from this mother group, but we will convene again intermittently, to share not only updates, but our successes in saving lives. We developed problem statements in partnership with states and government agencies and we are confident addressing these constraints through innovation and partnerships.
“The NHIM virtual portal has gone live. This is home to the six critical components of the marketplace which by their intrinsic design will spur innovation, whether it is through knowledge sharing, creating visibility for innovators, developing capabilities of innovators, linking innovators with investors, fostering collaboration or generating healthy competition,” Wigwe pointed out.
Muntaqa Umar-Sadiq, CEO, PHN, revealed that while Malawi, Uganda and Sierra Leone have developed locally appropriate health technologies and innovations such as Apps, mHealth, etc. to improve health outcomes, health innovations that exist in Nigeria tends to not attain scale/create sustainable impact due to poor support system for health innovators; they lack access to capital, business and financial management and basic business startup support/incubations needed to take ideas through to market.
“Investors have little visibility on compelling viable health innovations. Investors and health innovators lack convergence platforms that create market and technical linkages.”
