Welcome to Sati - Sourcing Africa to Invest

👋🏾 Marge and Ona here!

We’re both Ugandan 🇺🇬

And through our work at Benue Capital, we’re on a mission to support Uganda’s tech ecosystem and invest in extraordinary founders across Sub-Saharan Africa.

We write Sati to uncover Africa’s history of tech and private investment to understand the present and predict the future.

Join us; let’s see where this ride takes us 🚌

This is part 3 of our series on FemTech in Africa.

If you’re new here and want to catch up, check out Part 1 and Part 2.

To give you a quick overview, we’ve so far explored:

• Why women are pivotal to improving Africa’s economy

• Four health-related challenges African women face that hamper their ability to contribute to economic development

• Characteristics of venture backable solutions and where nontech solutions can thrive

• An overview of the FemTech landscape and whitespace for founders to build.

In Part 2, we identified oncology as a major whitespace for innovation.

So, today, we’re excited to share the story of a remarkable founder who has made a significant impact in this field.

Meet Shamim Nabuuma Kalisa, founder of CHIL Femtech Center

Like us, Shamim is Ugandan.

This story follows the many stages of Shamim’s life that brought her to where she is today.

Early Life

Born in Masaka, Uganda, Shamim completed primary school locally and then moved to Kampala for her secondary education.

All along, her parents believed the best path for her would be to become a doctor, so she began her Bachelor’s degree in Medicine (Surgery) at Makerere University.

During her time in University, she spent a lot of time in the cancer institute serving patients.

She came to realize that many people in rural areas didn’t have access to such care.

To save more lives, she started looking for ways to help.

Her search involved getting connected to corporations and contacts in business.

And this exposure shaped the beginning of her mobile cancer screening clinic.

Building a Mobile Cancer Screening Clinic

The venture seemed simple to the naked eye: it would involve setting up tents in rural communities for people to come for screenings.

But A LOT happened behind the scenes.

1. Obtaining a customer base

   Rather than marketing to individuals, Shamim worked with women’s groups across the country to gather large numbers for screenings.

2. Building a team

   Shamim couldn't do this alone. She recruited her friends, both nurses and doctors. Some volunteered; others required some form of compensation.

3. Training the team

   They started with breast and cervical cancer screening.

   Equipment had to be sanitized, patients handled with care and given accurate information, and specimens properly labeled to ensure each patient received the correct diagnosis.

4. Transporting the team and equipment

   She traveled with 2-3 nurses or doctors in a van with lab equipment.

   When not on site, she kept equipment where she stayed and in a store.

5. Financing the venture

   As you can imagine, this all cost money.

   As a student with little savings and no collateral for a bank loan, she relied on patience and mutually beneficial deals with team members.

   She also got partners that supported women’s initiatives.

   But she needed more funding to make this work.

Initial Funding and Mentorship

Shamim looked for capital, mostly on Google.

She stumbled across the Tony Elumelu Foundation fellowship.

Businesses or ideas under 5 years could apply for $5,000 seed capital, mentorship, and business management training.

The program would last 3 months and capital would be deployed after completion.

Without a second thought, Shamim applied.

While she was in class one afternoon, she received her acceptance email!

The program taught Shamim how to pitch, sell, and package her solution.

She used the $5K to market, brand, and invest in resources for her clinic.

Roadblocks to Growth

The mobile clinic model had slim margins and was capital intensive, making it impossible to sustain.

To elaborate, because Shamim’s target market, women in rural areas, did not generally have internet access, she assembled a field marketing team to find women’s groups that needed screening.

Women would pay a small fee upfront for their screenings. Gathering funds could take several months, but groups had to pay in full before Shamim deployed the mobile clinic.

Once her team arrived, many people who hadn’t paid would show up requesting to be screened. While Shamim wanted to help, as a business owner, she could only serve paying customers. Instead, she’d encourage folks who didn’t pay to come to her next site visit.

Additionally, many wanted services they hadn’t originally paid for. For example, popular requests included blood pressure and diabetes scans. However, the team was not equipped to provide this care.

Moreover, logistics and weather were issues.

Uganda doesn’t have the best roads, so getting to rural locations is time intensive.

Plus, the mobile clinics were held outside. So when it rained, there was no shelter, and a full day could be lost.

Pivoting to a Scalable Business Model

Shamim had to think up a scalable way to screen for cancer.

But her time was limited. Medical students are in class all day.

It was her 4th year, and when not in class, she spent a lot of time on Google trying to understand how to monetize businesses. She learned that incorporating technology could change the trajectory of her company.

So, she started a website on Wix that would allow people to set up telemedicine consultations with doctors.

While searching online for funding, Shamim came across the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards (GSEA) that were being held in Macau, China. She applied, sharing her mobile cancer screening startup and telemedicine website.

And sure enough, she was accepted.

When she shared the news with her parents, like most, they had concerns about what this would mean for her education, given that she would miss some school.

But she knew it was an opportunity of a lifetime and decided to take the chance.

She didn’t need to find the money to go because the trip was fully funded.

When she got there, she found other Africans as well as people from all over the world.

Each candidate had to pitch their solution. Since Shamim pitched the only “tech” solution being built amongst the African candidates, she won the African category.

During her time in Macau, Shamim met a 16 year old boy from Slovakia who had a niece who cried a lot. To better understand babies, he created a device that could detect the cause of a baby's cry.

Shamim was in awe of his technology.

Everybody in the program had amazing ideas but his struck her as unique because of his age. His innovative spirit shaped how she approached designing her product.

She went on to develop a chatbot, called the Keti App, that she integrated into her website.

This was her first foray into AI.

The chatbot allowed patients to share their names and issues via SMS.

The app would identify the patient’s symptoms, make a referral, and set up an appointment with the right doctor to consult with.

This gave Shamim more reach because patients without internet access could leverage the app.

She also offered the solution to rural clinics and local schools that often had nurses but didn’t always have doctors on site.

She monetized this product right away.

Shortly after returning from China, Shamim came across another opportunity; a Google hosted pitch drive across Asia.

She applied and was accepted amongst 10 other Africans.

The drive involved pitching to different investors within the region with Google’s support.

Along the way, Google offered coaching on pitching, storytelling, and product development.

She was able to secure significant financing to continue to scale.

Returning Home

Shamim’s trip to China and across Asia resulted in her missing quite a bit of school. Therefore, she needed more time to meet her requirements to graduate.

While her passion was entrepreneurship and building her company, which she later officially called CHIL Femtech Center, she also had to balance school. She became an expert in time management.

COVID restrictions gave her the space to complete school while growing her company.

Throughout this time, she received several awards and raised more financing.

For example, she won an award from Amazon for being one of the few African women using AI in Healthcare.

She was also selected by Bloomberg Media as one of the women in the world using technology to influence their communities.

While receiving this award, she realized the importance of media and started putting herself out there, building on her nearly 15K X (formerly Twitter) following.

Expanding Beyond Uganda

CHIL Femtech initially expanded into Kenya.

But when CHIL Femtech entered Tanzania, Shamim devised a business model that transformed the trajectory of her company.

As mentioned above, Shamim had previously built the Keti App, an AI chatbot that allowed patients to share their medical concerns. The app would identify the patient’s symptoms, make a referral, and set up an appointment with the right doctor to consult with.

Shamim expanded the app's capabilities, making it a central feature of her online, hub-and-spoke health marketplace. Rural clinicians, nurses in school sick bays, and patients could all leverage the app to make informed diagnostic decisions and get the patient in front of the right practitioner for a telemedicine consultation.

The Keti App is extremely valuable within these settings because medical care in rural areas mostly depends on semi-skilled nurses, self-medication, and inadequate laboratory testing.

This model resembles a bicycle wheel, with the hub representing CHIL’s partner hospitals and the spokes symbolizing partner local clinics and school sickbays.

It is a distribution network that enables efficient delivery of healthcare services to underserved areas. By centralizing healthcare service delivery at the hub, patients from remote locations can receive medical attention and consultation through the network of spokes.

Implementing the Model

Rural clinics and sickbays are provided with the appropriate telemedicine equipment compatible with the Keti AI chatbot to serve patients. Nurses are trained to use the technology and ensure patients can connect for e-consultation sessions with doctors if required.

If lab tests are needed, they are conducted at the spoke and either assessed there or sent to the hub or partner laboratories.

Results are uploaded to the patient EMR (electronic medical records) account for the doctor to review and prescribe required medications.

Prescriptions can be picked up at the spoke or ordered from the hub or a partner pharmacy.

The Impact of the Model

The hub-and-spoke model exemplifies how medical care can reach even the most remote areas, reducing unnecessary travel. This approach not only benefits medical facilities and patients but also contributes to sustainability by lowering gas emissions.

CHIL Femtech currently has 1,030 health centers and schools connected to their three modern hubs for emergencies. They’ve performed over 4 million consultations.

Additionally, as mentioned, while CHIL started as a cancer screening mobile clinic, it now provides:

1. Cardiology

2. Oncology

3. Neurology

4. Endocrinology

5. Nephrology

6. Urology

7. Pediatrics

8. Obstetrics and Gynecology

9. School Telemedicine

The platform also has a few other functionalities, including training health practitioners on WHO guidelines and disaster relief, such as floods and drought.

The Big Picture

What started as a mobile cancer screening clinic has become a robust online health marketplace, giving rural facilities and patients access to world-class doctors, labs, and pharmacies.

What stood out to us was that CHIL Femtech's healthcare system houses medical records for thousands and, in the future, potentially millions of patients living in rural communities across the globe.

This data can be used to make predictive models on standard health issues observed in different regions and leveraged for large scale interventions to improve the livelihoods of the most vulnerable populations.

How does she do it?

Listen, if there's one thing you should take away from reading this piece, it's that Shamim is one of a kind.

What sets her apart is her persistence and consistency.

Her current state didn’t dawn upon her overnight.

From the beginning, she understood what it would take to get here, and she’s patiently navigated the process, learning from peers and those that have been where she wants to be.

Use her story as inspiration for how you can go about building and making change in an area you’re passionate about.

That’s all we have for you this week!

Thanks so much for making it to the end!

If there’s anything else you’d like us to explore, send us a note. We’d love to hear from you! You can find us on:

• Twitter: Marge, Ona

• LinkedIn: Marge, Ona

• Email (Reply to this email)

If you enjoyed this piece, make sure to sign up to get more like this in your inbox soon!