Managing Director of Access Bank Plc and Chair of the Nigeria Health Innovation Marketplace (NHIM), Herbert Wigwe has advocated a consensus building between donors, government and the private sector in order to address healthcare challenges in Nigeria.
Speaking
at the presentation of awards to inaugural winners of the Health
Innovation Challenge Awards in Lagos, Wigwe noted that health
innovators, through their disruptive and entrepreneurial thinking have
been able to come with solutions to some of the most daunting challenges
in Nigeria’s health sector.
A
Nigerian-made malaria test that can diagnose the disease within 25
minutes using drops of patients sample won the inaugural 2015 Health
Innovation Challenge Awards. Accordingly, Wigwe appealed for private and
public sector support to the health innovators, stressing that such
combined efforts would play a critical role in addressing healthcare
challenges and broader market failures.
“Over
the last twelve months, the Health Innovation Challenge went through
massive campaigns and rigorous internal and independent assessments to
identify people and organizations, who in various corners of Nigeria, in
all geo-political zones, are on the path of disrupting healthcare
challenges. These bold individuals and their teams are looking at
healthcare service delivery, medical technologies, locally manufactured
commodities and even healthcare financing, in different ways, in a bid
to take us down paths that achieve the result of better health outcomes
in Nigeria“, he stated.
According
to him, the innovators, through their disrupting thinking have modelled
their theories of change and innovations to be viable, profitable and
sustainable for years to come. “This is a shift of the lens through
which we have seen healthcare, which is that it is not merely a public
good for which we rely on government but also that the private sector
can play a central role in expanding citizens’ access to better quality“.
From
among over 100 entries, 42 innovations went through the recent business
development boot camp, 12 were adopted into an accelerator program
while 6 innovators were rewarded with various amounts of grants. These
grants are based on expert reviews of innovations’ potentials to save
lives and their ability to self-sustain after the seed stage catalytic
funding has been granted.
Chief Executive Officer of Private Sector Health Alliance of Nigeria (PHN), Dr. Muntaqa Umar-Sadiq said, “It
is important to use innovative platforms to improve healthcare in
Nigeria adding that various players in the country including PHN, Health Strategy and Delivery Foundation (HSDF), Flint Atlantic Capital, International Finance Corporation (IFC) and others are already converging a market for healthcare social enterprise and impact investment capital“.
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