The HGS Accelerator for Pandemic Resilience is an initiative that aims to accelerate the growth of African healthcare companies to strengthen the continent’s pandemic resilience, in line with the African Union's Agenda 2063 aspirations. This is achieved through offering hands-on and tailored support to growth and mature stage healthcare businesses. AUDA-NEPAD founded the accelerator initiative in 2020 in partnership with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and with support from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a global management consulting firm, and Villgro Africa, an experienced Pan-African Accelerator.

As a reminder, on March 24th, 14 African healthcare ventures were selected to be a part of the Home-Grown-Solutions and form the second cohort to receive support by the initiative.

As a formal kick-off to the initiative, on the 13th of April we conducted a plenary session where the HGS could meet the operational core team as well as their peers. The event was successful with the HGS manifesting high excitement for the program.

During the month of April our 7 Portfolio Managers, each managing two HGS, continued to assess and tailor the acceleration plan with the ventures based on our current offering of context specific advisory, investment readiness support and matching to strategic partners.

Below is an overview of our Portfolio Managers for this year and overview of acceleration areas.

Yannick Diogo

            Consultant at BCG Nairobi, supporting Sinapi and Polyclinique Pasteur

            Background in Economics & Business, from Angola

Terry  Otinga

            Consultant at BCG Nairobi, supporting Dawa and Rology

            Background in Actuarial Science and Finance, from Kenya

Moses Waweru

            Senior Portfolio Manager at Villgro Africa, supporting Streamline and DataPathology

            Background in Global Health and Business Administration, from Kenya

Snider Mugese

            Senior Portfolio Manager at Villgro Africa, supporting Simbona and Doctoora

            Background in Financial Engineering, from Kenya

Edwin Osora

            Portfolio Manager at Villgro Africa, supporting OCLIYA and Doctor on Call

            Background in Actuarial Science, from Kenya

Kay Smith

            Consultant at BCG Lagos, supporting Africa Health Holdings and MDaaS Global

            Background in Business Administration, from Nigeria

Immanuel Momanyi

            Senior Portfolio Manager at Villgro Africa, supporting Appy Saúde and WiiQare

            Background in Actuarial Science, from Kenya

Also, we’ve been keeping a close touch with our alumni as Revital Healthcare launched a new respiratory kit device on May 20th. The device, a high-quality infant CPAP system delivers blended oxygen to new-borns without the use of electricity, compressed or manual power, driving impact in low-resource settings.

To conclude, on the week of May 30 members of our core team, Bernice Mclean, George Murumba and Kossi Toulassi, part of AUDA-NEPAD recently conducted a field mission in Kenya where they visited Dawa, a pharmaceuticals firm with pan African sales as part of our current cohort, and Access Afya, our alumni which builds and operates Primary healthcare clinics in low-income neighborhoods.