At this year’s SAPICS Conference in Cape Town, a powerful healthcare-focused panel discussion spotlighted Africa’s emergence as a creator of health supply chain innovations with global potential.

The session brought together trailblazing African entrepreneurs who are transforming medicine access, patient safety and healthcare supply chain systems across the continent. It was moderated by Stella Kivila, a pharmacist, health technology consultant and strategic advisor with a deep commitment to advancing African-led healthcare solutions. Currently the Director of Healthtech Strategy & Impact at Salient Advisory, Kivila works alongside her colleagues to advance African-led healthtech and innovations through strategic partnerships with forward-thinking industry, foundations and governments.

Kivila opened the session with insights drawn from Salient’s work tracking more than 1 000 healthtech innovators across Africa. “We are seeing a new generation of African entrepreneurs tackling one of the continent’s most pressing problems: fragmented and inefficient medicine supply chains,” she said.

The Cost of Fragmentation

Across Africa, public sector healthcare distribution systems are overburdened. Most consumers rely on fragmented private sector supply chains that drive up costs and compromise quality. Kivila noted that this fragmentation often adds as much as 60% to the final price patients pay for medicines. A further concern is that patients are left with little guarantee of quality or availability and there is a significant risk of counterfeit and substandard products entering the system.

But as she explained, African-led innovators are working to close these gaps through technology, data and new business models. Two standout examples - Dawa Mkononi from Tanzania and Meditect from Côte d’Ivoire - took centre stage at SAPICS 2025 to share their journeys.

Dawa Mkononi: “Medicine in the Palm of Your Hand”

Dawa Mkononi means “medicine in the palm of your hand”. For Dr. Joseph Paul, the business’s founder, the road to innovation began with heartbreak. While assisting a mother during childbirth in a rural Tanzanian village, he found that the essential drug needed to accelerate labour was unavailable. Six hours later, the family returned with a medicine that sadly proved ineffective. It was likely a counterfeit. That moment sparked a mission. As a medical doctor with a passion for software engineering, Paul developed a digital platform and distribution model that delivers medicine within hours in urban areas, complete with inventory services and demand prediction. His business now supplies pharmacies, clinics and hospitals with safe, verified medicines and flexible credit financing.

In just a few years, Dawa Mkononi has served over 500 000 patients, reached more than 1 000 pharmacies and facilitated over $1 million in credit to health facilities. “Our mission is to make medicine accessible, affordable and safe, through data-driven supply chains,” Paul told the SAPICS audience. His company is growing fourfold annually, demonstrating both the magnitude of the problem and the scalability of African-born solutions when given the right support.

Meditect: Restoring Trust in Medicines

For Dr. Arnaud Pourredon, founder of Meditect and a former surgeon in Côte d’Ivoire, the decision to leave his clinical career was similarly rooted in a moment of despair. “I couldn’t buy malaria treatment for a three-year-old child. That’s when I knew we had to fix the system,” he recalled.

Meditect provides digital tools that support drug traceability, supply chain visibility and pharmacy management. With a focus on Francophone Africa, where populations are growing rapidly and infrastructure often lags, Meditect is helping to leapfrog traditional barriers through technology. “By improving access to quality medicine and enhancing transparency, we can increase life expectancy in Africa by 10 years,” Pourredon said.

His platform now supports thousands of healthcare professionals across the region and is a beacon for what’s possible when innovation is rooted in local understanding.

Investing in Innovation: The i3 Model

Both Dawa Mkononi and Meditect are part of the Investing in Innovation (i3) programme, a value-creation network launched in 2022 to help scale commercial African supply chain innovations. Rather than acting as a traditional accelerator, i3 connects promising local innovators with donors, governments and the private sector to champion both economic and health outcomes. In its first 24 months, i3 has provided $3M in direct grant funding to 60 start-ups across 18 African countries. Sponsored by the Gates Foundation, MSD, Cencora (formerly AmerisourceBergen), Endless Foundation, HELP Logistics (a subsidiary of the Kühne Foundation) and Sanofi’s Global Health Unit, i3 provides risk-tolerant funding, tailored market access support and opportunities to partner with governments, donors and major healthcare organisations.

“Africa doesn’t lack ingenuity. It lacks systems to support and scale it,” Kivila emphasised. “That’s what we’re fixing with i3.”

Building Resilient, Locally-Led Health Systems

Beyond numbers and technologies, the SAPICS panel discussion served as a rallying call for rethinking the role of African innovators in shaping the continent’s future - and the global healthcare landscape more broadly. Whether it’s Dawa Mkononi’s last-mile delivery model or Meditect’s traceability platforms, these companies are creating blueprints for responsive, transparent, efficient and scalable healthcare systems. They are also creating jobs, strengthening communities and demonstrating that sustainable transformation in patient care is possible.

As Kivila concluded, “Africa’s healthcare future does not have to be imported. It is being built here - by Africans, for Africans, and increasingly, for the world.”

More than 700 supply chain managers from across Africa and around the world convened in Cape Town for this year’s 47th annual SAPICS Conference - to learn, share knowledge and network. This is the leading event in Africa for the supply chain profession.