“When I started Ilara, I was going into low-income areas of Nairobi and there was no lab. I was Google Mapping for labs and there's no labs. So my immediate entrepreneurial conclusion, well, there is no lab, there should be a lab so let me build labs. But the reality is that you can't just build labs because if you just be labs and there is no one to prescribe tests, you're not going to solve the problem. So we saw that how can we actually bring those labs on the desk, very, very close to the patient? What we are doing is not only that we scout the world for these point-of-care diagnostic technologies, which is evolving very, very fast, in the same way, you know, our iPhones and our phones have evolved in the past 10 years. It's evolving very fast, it's become cheaper and cheaper. So we've identified, we're curating those devices, we bring them into Africa, we finance them. So we place them door-to-door into those nurse-led medical facilities, but with a leasing model to make it affordable to them to have those devices, to be able to deliver better diagnostic and cheaper diagnostics, and obviously to be able to make revenue and to be able to pay us back that leasing fee. And on top of this, we connect those devices with a piece of technology to be able to get the results in a centralized way and communicate them back to the clinician and eventually back to the patient.”
18 Nov 2021
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