Q&A: Launch of a new hub for African health tech startups

Amid the current surge of technological solutions to health challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Novartis Foundation, in collaboration with Norrsken Foundation, has launched the HealthTech Hub Africa. Focused on supporting African entrepreneurs to scale up solutions, the hub will provide a network for innovators to tap into as they tackle issues such as heart disease, breast cancer, and developing virtual health and care.

“The HealthTech Hub Africa is a combination of a physical innovation space and also a community,” said Lucy Setian, director of digital transformation at the Novartis Foundation. “It's a hybrid health tech accelerator program, a community space for health tech entrepreneurs, and a convening space where the network can come and find the right partners to work on some of the biggest health challenges of our time.”

Launching the hub, the foundations hosted a pitch competition that saw winner Insightiv Technologies — a Rwandan startup working to make medical imaging more timely and accessible, thus improving diagnostic speed — receive $30,000. Four runners-up also received grants, while a total of 30 startups were selected to be hosted at the HealthTech Hub Africa’s physical space in Kigali, Rwanda.

“We have selected 30 that already have a good level of validated solutions. That's important because we believe that if something has been already tested [and] shows potential, we can bring the extra level of support they need,” Setian said.

Sitting down with Devex, she discussed the challenges often faced by health technology startups in Africa as they work to scale and how the HealthTech Hub Africa could help to overcome those.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What are the major challenges to scaling up health technology in Africa?

Unfortunately, not a lot of the entrepreneurs who are on the ground have sufficient financial resources or capacity. Finding the right partners to support what they're trying to develop and test is difficult. Having initial financial capital to kick-start an idea is important, but to accelerate, it's even more so.

To create some of those solutions, you also need data. That's the other big problem they usually face. They need health data. They also need nonhealth data. Unfortunately, this data is usually sitting in silos in different hospitals, institutions, and in private sector networks. It's quite difficult to obtain.

The last challenge is that a lot of these startups and innovators don't necessarily know what the regulatory policies or conditions under which they can deploy these kinds of innovations are. That's not only a challenge for African entrepreneurs, but entrepreneurs as a whole in geographies around the world where there are not yet clear regulations and recommendations on data privacy, ethics, and transparency [or] regulations around how data-hungry solutions can be deployed, especially in the health data-driven solutions.

How can these challenges be overcome?

You need the right network and to be supported with different kinds of partnerships. The word “partnership” can be very broad, but you have to think very specifically about who can help with what.

The second piece is having a network in which you can find investors, funders, donors. … In the context of the HealthTech Hub Africa, we hope to have two big summits where — after all the startups go through the capacity-building activities, training, and investor readiness preparation — they’ll have an opportunity to pitch in front of real investors.

Hopefully, they’ll get the funding they need to scale their solutions beyond their region and country, and hence see their innovations leapfrog to other hot spots of need where they can bring impact to underprivileged populations.

Most of the time, you also have to strike a good balance on the team. Finding good specialists to join your startup is very hard. Having a network of health and technology experts — in which you can find the right people to partner with, to join your team, but also to find the right mentors — is crucial.

How does the HealthTech Hub Africa aim to help kick-start the development of the 30 health technology startups?

We’re putting in place a health tech innovation program containing training based on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Disciplined Entrepreneurship curriculum, together with Bridge for Billions, who will also deploy a virtual platform where these digital trainings are available [and] where there’s going to be mentorship matchmaking between the startup teams and mentors from the health tech space.

We’re also going to create expert sessions [that] we consider more as interactive mentoring exercises and opportunities. … We want to try to create this “glue” in the local ecosystem so that the right opportunities arise for these young companies to validate, iterate, and go to the next level.

During the course of the year, right before the two big summits — one is planned for May and one in October — we plan to work with Norrsken on investor readiness. That means [the startups] having the right financial [and] presentation skill sets to get the type of financing or in-kind support to boost whatever they're doing. We are hoping to find and nurture the next health tech “unicorn” amongst our ranks.

Can you tell us a bit about the 30 health technology startups that were selected?

For the first cohort, we have three main tracks. One of the biggest challenges during COVID-19 has been the fact that people are confined to their houses, so virtual care is more important than ever. That's why one of the main tracks is dedicated specifically to virtual care.

We are also working heavily on the scope of cardiovascular population health. More than 17 million people die every year from cardiovascular events, and we have found some innovative solutions in this space. We also have a track on breast cancer. All the startups work in one or more of these domains.

When we were selecting the startups, for us it was also important not only to have the local entrepreneurs, but also to have a gender balance. A lot of the teams have either founders who are female or team members that are female. That was super important to us.

Do you have a call to action around the need to invest in health technology in Africa?

There are so many opportunities, and we know that the best innovations come from the ground up rather than being imported. … Having solutions that are local means that first they are developed for the needs of the local context, but also with data that's local. If those startups can fix those challenges in such a difficult context, you can only imagine what's possible in easier contexts with those same solutions.

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