In 2000, Jennie Nwokoye, the founder of a Nigerian healthtech startup, Clafiya, moved to Nigeria with her family when as a child. For someone born and raised in the United States, that was the first time she encountered difficulty accessing basic healthcare.
She and her family stayed in the country for five to six years before moving back to the United States.
As an adult, she returned to Nigeria every year and noticed that the problem — limited access to healthcare — remained unsolved.
So, as a graduate student specialising in systems engineering at Georgetown University, United States, in 2018, she began developing the concept of Clafiya.
“When I was accepted to Georgetown, our first class was like an introduction to systems engineering, and then we had to choose a complex system to write about. And I consider Nigeria’s healthcare system complex, particularly its primary healthcare,” Nwokoye explains.
That was how she began writing about Clafiya from an academic…
