Temie Giwa-Tubosun and the startup that delivers blood the way couriers deliver parcels
After a difficult childbirth and years studying maternal health, Temie Giwa-Tubosun built LifeBank to find blood and deliver it to Nigerian hospitals fast. In 2019 it won a quarter of a million dollars.
In 2009, a graduate student on an internship in Abuja met a woman named Aisha whose labour had gone on for far too long. The encounter, Temie Giwa-Tubosun later explained, convinced her that maternal mortality in Nigeria was a problem she could not look away from.
Born in Ila Orangun, in Osun State, she had moved to the United States as a teenager and trained in international policy. She returned to Nigeria in 2012 and, in the same year, founded a non-profit called the One Percent Project to encourage blood donation and improve the distribution of blood between hospitals.
A logistics problem in disguise
In January 2016 she turned the idea into a business. LifeBank is a Lagos-based medical distribution company that uses data and technology to locate blood and other essential medical products and deliver them to hospitals. Giwa-Tubosun has said the company was partly inspired by the birth of her first child and the complications she experienced.
The insight is that blood shortage in Nigeria is often a matter of finding and moving it, not only of collecting it. Hospitals may not know which blood bank has the right type. LifeBank makes that visible and handles the delivery. One count reports the company delivered tens of thousands of medical products to more than ten thousand patients across nearly 700 hospitals.
Global notice
In August 2016, Mark Zuckerberg met her during his first visit to Nigeria and referred to her work in a town hall the following day. She was named to the BBC’s 100 Women list in 2014. In November 2019 LifeBank won Jack Ma’s Africa Netpreneur Prize in Accra, worth 250,000 dollars, selected from more than 10,000 applicants across 50 African countries. In December 2020 she received the Global Citizen Prize for Business Leader, in recognition of LifeBank’s work, including during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Why it matters
LifeBank is an example of a pattern that African health founders keep returning to. The product is not a new medical device. It is a clearer route between supply and demand, built with phones, data and a fleet. That makes the idea easier to copy than a new drug, but harder to execute well, because the real asset is trust with hospitals and reliable delivery. That is where Giwa-Tubosun’s years of groundwork pay off.
