Ask anyone who’s had to call for emergency help in Lagos what happened next, and you’ll get a version of the same story: a number that sometimes takes forever to connect, a dozen calls, and then a miraculous person with a car or who knows someone who does. Ambulances exist, but nothing coordinates them.
Medwaka’s founders ran into this problem from the other direction. They started out trying to solve blood donation shortages for pregnant women in Ondo State, and kept hitting the same wall: nobody could get from the point of distress to the point of care. So they rebuilt the company around solving that instead: a dispatch and coordination layer sitting on top of hospitals, ambulances, and first responders, which already existed individually.
And that right there is the part that’s easy to miss in a founder story. They weren’t just solving an ambulance shortage; they were fixing a coordination failure that a functioning public system should have solved decades ago.
It’s essentially the same pattern with money. Nigeria’s primary healthcare centres are chronically underfunded, and fixing that starts with how badly fiscal policy misses the people who need it most. Money gets budgeted, but is not always released. When it is, it may still fail to reach the facility level in ways that translate into patient care. TC Insights went looking for where people go when that happens and found an entire informal healthcare economy: patent medicine vendors, unlicensed clinics, and community-level caregivers quietly absorbing the patients the formal system was supposed to catch.
Originally published by TechCabal.