Ismail Badjie, 36, co-founded Innovarx Global Health, a Gambia-based healthcare services company whose mission is to transform healthcare delivery in sub-Saharan Africa.
I was born in Gambia. At age 18, I traveled to the United States to attend college, first at Tennessee State University, where I earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, and then at Purdue University for my PharmD. After getting my PharmD, I started practicing at a Walgreens store in Charlotte, North Carolina. Before leaving Walgreens to start Innovarx, I was a pharmacy manager where I oversaw $1 million in inventory and helped generate $60 million annually. In 2019, my co-founder Gerard Mengang and I left Walgreens to build Innovarx Global Health. Many people thought we were crazy. but we imagine what the next 10 years of health care in sub-Saharan Africa would look like. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry, and we wanted to get going soon to position ourselves to capture market share and be part of shaping the industry Today, we operate a physical store in Banjul [The Gambia’s capital] and have an e-commerce business, a global telemedicine platform, electronic health record (EHR) integration support, and a mobile clinical unit.
We founded Innovarx Global Health in 2015, before leaving Walgreens, but it took us another six years to open our first franchise. We spent those six years learning about the future of healthcare, including traveling to India, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, and China to gain a global perspective. Each country educated us on what was possible. If we hadn’t made those trips, we would have created a poor company. Many companies create an African version of a business that operates in other regions. We decided to do something different. We took a global idea and we wanted Africa to be the first place to receive it. We selected The Gambia as a starting point because it is familiar terrain; it has a small population and we could control many variables in this market. More importantly, there is a need because only 4 percent of Gambians have health benefits, mostly in the form of private insurance, and can access preventive medicine. Many companies create an African version of a business that operates in other regions. We decided to do something different. We took a global idea and we wanted Africa to be the first place to receive it.
Innovarx Global Health, we built an American-style community pharmacy; is a vertically integrated operation that leverages technologies for telemedicine, point-of-care diagnostics, electronic prescription processing, retail e-commerce, and last-mile delivery of quality healthcare products and services. Our model is based on continuity of care and preventive health services. Today we have 65 employees in Gambia and Ghana, and we hope to replicate our model in Lagos, Nigeria. When you start a company in Africa, you become a human development company because there is a huge talent gap. You can’t post a job ad and get a lot of qualified people. We had to put significant resources into developing our team to operate at a high level. Many companies are not willing to invest what is necessary for their team to perform at a global level. That is why people would rather go into the commodity business because you don’t need much human development in that sector. Our goal is to continue creating talent by altering the pay scale locally to attract and retain high-performing employees. We pay up to 20 percent more than the market rate. We have changed the landscape of healthcare delivery in The Gambia. We have established a new way of providing care. Our successes include adding 200 active subscribers to our all-inclusive annual care plan that covers routine delivery of medications and diagnostic tests needed to manage chronic conditions like diabetes. We have around 12,000 active clients; Gambians living in the diaspora who sponsor the care of their loved ones locally have played a huge role in our success. Around 50 per cent of our revenue in 2020 came from outside The Gambia.
Source: This news was originally published by newsghana