Evercare Hospital Lekki, a private multispecialty tertiary care facility, was officially unveiled by the Vice President of Nigeria, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, and the Governor of Lagos State, Babajide Sanwo-Olu on March 11 2021. The building is a concrete example of efforts by 2018 Tutu Fellow Temi Marcella Awogboro to bring it into being and she currently serves as an Executive Director with Evercare Hospital Lekki. The hospital is wholly owned by the Evercare Health Fund, a $ 1 billion emerging markets healthcare fund managed by The Rise Fund, the impact investment platform of global alternative asset manager TPG Capital. Temi played a key role in bringing this deal together and she was the West Africa deal lead of the fund.
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Dr Angela Gichaga - a 2019 Tutu Fellow - joined the PSI Board in January 2021. Population Services International (PSI) is a non-profit global health organization with programs targeting malaria, child survival, HIV, and reproductive health. It is based in Washington, DC; Nairobi; and Amsterdam and has been in existence for more than half a decade.
PSI says that while it is a nonprofit, it uses measurable business practices to build strong health systems in the private and public sector to save lives. It has more than 8,000 local experts in more than 50 countries with which it works.
2019 Tutu Fellow Sangu Delle's company has opened a new Rabito Clinic in Accra, Ghana. Sangu's company, Africa Health Holdings, opened the clinic in East Legon in July.
The services the clinic will provide include general medicine, dermatology, urology, gynecology, physiotherapy and speech and language therapy. Rabito Clinic’s main area of practice is in dermatology, offering a wide range of treatments for patients with skin problems, including acne, autoimmune and connective tissue disease, HIV-related skin disorders, moles, melanoma surveillance, pigmentation disorders, wound and ulcer care, and more.
2017 Tutu Fellow Yap Boum II has been on the front line of the ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo since it began more than a year ago, in one of the deadliest ebola epidemics on record. In July, the outbreak was designated a an international health emergency by the World Health Organisation.
Yap is the regional representative for Epicentre Africa, the research arm of Doctors Without Borders, and has been directly involved in a Phase III trial ebola vaccine that is being used to reduce the numbers of people infected by the disease. Al Jazeera interviewed him about how the struggle to contain the disease is going.
I recently came across the story of a young African-American man, Charles Johnson IV, who is fighting for legislation to increase the quality of health care to reduce maternal mortality among African-American women. His own wife died after delivering a healthy baby via caesarean section. She bled to death because doctors at a very prestigious hospital in the U.S. ignored her haemorrhaging for several hours. Her name was Kira Dixon Johnson. She was very well educated and reasonably well-off and yet she became another statistic. In America, African-American women are 243% more likely to die to child-birth than their white American colleagues. Even wealthy, educated African-American women are still more likely to die in child-birth than white women.
A third of the medicines available in parts of Africa are fake. People have as much as a 50% chance of getting the wrong drug. Patients can’t tell if they are getting the real thing and counterfeit drugs are manufactured in dangerous conditions. 2010 Tutu Fellow Bright Simons outlines in this TEDx talk in Hamburg and how the aim of his company is to use technology to determine the authenticity of medicines. Counterfeit medicines are a real issue in Africa, where near-perfect copies of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies can jeopardize the recovery of patients, or worse, lead to the deaths of people.