Abimbola Adebakin is a pharmacist, an entrepreneur, and the founder of Advantage Health Africa. She was once the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the Tony Elumelu Foundation, winner of the Google Black Founders Fund, and the Bayer Foundation, where she emerged as a Women Empowerment Award winner. In this interview by Kingsley Alumona, she speaks about her work, the pharmaceutical industry, among other issues.
Young people are usually not sure of what they want to study at the tertiary institution level. What motivated you to study pharmacy?
While career choices may be a difficult decision for young people — ultimately, it is the openness to learning both hard and soft skills that helps one thrive. Pharmacy was indeed a conscious choice for me, with the direction of my mum. Pharmacy ticked the boxes to be a professional, which was important to my parents back then.
In the last 30 years, how would you describe your career in business, entrepreneurship, and leadership as it relates to the pharmaceutical sector?
I see problems as opportunities. Nowadays, I flip the coin to think: How else can the problem be solved? Where else can we solve the problem? With whom else can we solve this problem? I guess this mindset led me to all that I currently do now. Advancing patient care and accelerating the attainment of universal health coverage is at the core of my work at Advantage Health Africa, and my training as a pharmacist is a core driver of this.
I have not always been in the pharma sector. Beyond pharmacy, my career traversed diverse sectors as a management consultant and operations lead in entrepreneurship development.
You are the founder and CEO of Advantage Health Africa (AHA). One of your brands covers telemedicine and discount laboratory services, which are mainly medical services. How do you manage your pharmacy services and the medical ones since you do not have a medical license? Â
You must know that a license is required for direct providers of medical care through hospitals, clinics, laboratories and pharmacies. Our focus at Advantage Health Africa is to democratise healthcare access through aggregation and technology while providing direct patient care through our pharmaceutical arms. For this, a license is a regulatory requirement. Our other innovative solutions layer upon the existing structure of partners. With some, we had to aggregate providers and innovators who deliver the requisite care to patients.
Another brand of AHA is myMedicines. What is the idea behind it and how does it work?
I saw people seeking medicines around, going from pharmacy to pharmacy and other places, yet, I knew these medicines existed. Since we launched myMedicines in October 2017, people have engaged us for their lifesaving medicines, whether via web platforms, social media, messaging apps, phone calls, email, or even SMS. Think of us as the backend for several innovators: HMOs, telemedicine providers, geriatric care platforms, etc., saving them and their patients the stress of sourcing for their medications. They save cost and time, and the risk of sourcing from untested sources. Our last-mile delivery excellence is powered by a strong logistics framework and an aggregated community of over 1000 pharmacies across the country.
I find it fulfilling that we have provided medicines to hard-to-reach and unreached persons including a farmer’s mum who resides in a rural area in Nigeria, and living with glaucoma, diabetes, and arthritis. She would have lost access to her medications during the COVID-19 pandemic. During COVID, when a lot of people’s lives were disrupted, we came through for prescribers and their patients to help, such that CNN featured us back then. Nigerians in the diaspora can rely on myMedicines to deliver medicines to their loved ones in Nigeria. We have recorded so many impact stories that validate the phenomenal power of myMedicines — from Sepeteri to Maiduguri, from Yenagoa to Sokoto, my team ensures medication access and affordability.
Delivering medicines at the doorsteps of people, as your business does, is innovative and forward-thinking. What are the major challenges you face doing this and how do you manage them?
A major challenge we encountered was the silo situation in our sector, and we were in dire need of a connecting backbone. We challenged ourselves to develop a tech solution and launched this powerful backend in November 2023. Called The Advantage, it provides business intelligence support to pharmacies in our network, just like Flexcube or Globus is for the banks. We are actively onboarding pharmacies now so that this core engine will drive real-time insight into inventory for us. But, not just us. It is positioned to fuel more collaboration with different healthcare stakeholders and catalyse operational efficiency and access to the market while delivering access to quality and affordable healthcare across Africa. Again, we modelled this like the real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system for banks.
Pre-The Advantage, we were generating up to an additional revenue of 10 million naira per annum to individual pharmacies in our fulfilment network. The goal is to multiply this figure by 10, up to 100 million naira per annum, within the next two years. The Advantage fuels this ambitious goal, promising pharmacies a comprehensive solution for seamless operations, revenue growth, and enhanced patient care. We are poised for stronger pharmacy-hospital linkages through our partners, since the platform’s integrative approach breaks down silos, fostering a more connected and patient-centric healthcare ecosystem.
In the course of running your business, how do you identify fake drugs, and also make sure they do not find their way into your chain of acquisition and distribution to your customers?
We adopted ISO 9001: 2015 standards in all our processes for quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC), even training pharmacies in these standards. This ensures that we provide our clients with only genuine, efficacious medicines.
Today, in Nigeria, given the economic hardship, what used to be basic medications are now luxuries most people cannot afford. Given this reality, how do you sustain your business and still make a profit?
It is truly a sad situation for a lot of people. However, positive social impact is at the forefront of our work with a sound for-profit business model, and it has helped to grow our business year after year, while providing affordable and convenient services to our clients.
In 2022, we introduced a solution to stabilise the prices of medicines for people and recently relaunched it as myZuriCare. It helps those with chronic illnesses to ease their out-of-pocket expenses. Also, we created a subscription-based model medication cover, where they pay a fee every month to benefit from a community-based health solution, called myAdvantage. They can get any medication prescribed for up to 10 health conditions. We launched these solutions in tandem with us looking into the future. These are our direct expressions to help, while we do several other things to ensure people benefit from bulk discounts in our other solutions.
What policies or strategies would you recommend that could make the prices of pharmaceutical products accessible and affordable, even to people in rural communities?
A major recommendation is to drive more indigenous pharmaceutical manufacturing and full implementation of tariff reductions when it comes to health consumables like medicines and equipment that cannot yet be manufactured locally. I advocate for these as an executive of the Healthcare Federation of Nigeria. You will see news of our recent roundtable discussion with the Nigerian Customs where we got several assurances from the Comptroller General as well as representative of the Ministry of Finance.
Apart from policies, medicine access and affordability are predicated on sustained strategies that can drive local production and it does not work overnight, though there are some quick wins in unlocking the value in our sector. For example, we need a health insurance system strategy that pools funds to bulk orders from local manufacturers so they produce and we can distribute medicines across the country. This will give confidence and much-needed backing to our local producers.
Let us talk about your leadership endeavours. What was the experience like working as the Chief Operating Officer of the Tony Elumelu Foundation and how did it impact your career?
I led the sustainable implementation of the pan-African Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneurship Programme with its clear goal to democratise luck for entrepreneurs to increase their revenue and catalyse job creation across Africa. You know the programme has successfully delivered these and I am proud to have been part of the vision.
The experience undoubtedly deepened my belief that Africans are the solution to Africa’s problems, and it is truly heroic that Tony Elumelu threw his brand behind. That experience has been invaluable as I count myself as one of those Africans able to make a meaningful impact, this time in healthcare, such that Africans can tick that off their ‘worry’ list.
In 2021, you were one of the winners of the Google Black Founders Fund. In what ways did the fund impact you and your business?
The Google BFF provided us access to capital, brand recognition, mentorship, and a network that was helpful for our growth. It was our second major validation by a global body (the first was by Bayer Foundation in the same year, where I emerged as a Women Empowerment Award winner) and boosted our confidence. Many startups need this from time to time. These programmes still support us to date.
Besides your major business, do you engage in community or social empowerment, like mentoring people and supporting small businesses?
I do, which is why I accept speaking engagements to inspire and mentor young pharmacists and entrepreneurs. I mentor for AWEC, WIMBIZ, and the Google Startup programme. As a corporate social responsibility (CSR) of Advantage Health Africa, I designed and serve as Programme Director of The Pharmacists Leadership Stimulant Programme (PLSP) which promotes career stabilisation and skills development for young pharmacists. It is currently in its 7th year with over 600 pharmacists as participants so far.
How do you manage the stress associated with your work? And how do your husband and children help in this regard?
I work hard and I do my best to create time for family, self-care, and rejuvenation. I have a positive enabling family set-up that makes a deep impact in motivating me. Having a phenomenal team also relieves me of immense stress. My team at Advantage Health Africa is fantastic. I say I am one of the most fortunate entrepreneurs on the AHA team. I wish it for every entrepreneur out there.
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