Dear reader,
LifeBank started as a marketplace for blood. Today, it’s a platform supplying critical medical supplies to hospitals, clinics, and aid organizations in Nigeria, Kenya, and Ethiopia. This has expanded beyond blood to include oxygen, ventilators, syringes, and more.
Over the past five years, LifeBank has generated an average of over $1 million in combined annual revenue through its healthcare supply chain, technology, and infrastructure businesses.
This article is an exclusive RO interview with Temie Giwa-Tubosun, co-founder of LifeBank.
In my conversation with Temie, we covered:
- What is the primary cause of maternal death in the world?
- What is the main obstacle in building a healthcare marketplace?
- How does LifeBank transport a product as delicate as blood?
- How did COVID-19 affect LifeBank’s operations?
- Why did LifeBank expand from blood to oxygen?
- How has USAID's pulling back funding affected LifeBank?
…and more.
Biography
Temie Giwa-Tubosun is the co-founder and CEO of LifeBank, a medical supplies company based in Nigeria.
Founded in 2015, LifeBank is a platform for hospitals and clinics to buy critical medical supplies such as blood, medical oxygen, PPE kits, and more. LifeBank initially started as a blood delivery company, but expanded to provide a suite of medical supplies and credit facilities for its clients.
Before founding LifeBank, Temie was Managing Director of the One Percent Project, where she led blood drive initiatives that collected over 1,165 pints of blood. She lives in the US.
How were you informed about the healthcare gaps in Africa?
It happened in layers.
After grad school, I joined the WHO in Switzerland on a health financing fellowship. That gave me a global view. I came to understand how money moves through health systems at an institutional level, and how institutions manage health systems at scale.
Following that, I moved to rural Uganda, where I worked on healthcare supply chains and maternal health programs through the Millennium Villages Project.
That experience exposed me to the consequences of broken medical logistics systems. If a stock of contraceptives was delayed, it meant women had to leave empty-handed, only to return again three days later. Or worse, they’d come back pregnant a few weeks later, when they didn’t want to be.
What was LifeBank's first product?
When I returned to Nigeria, I started talking to people in the maternal health space. I learned that the primary cause of maternal death in the world, Nigeria included, is postpartum haemorrhage.
Postpartum haemorrhage happens when a mother starts bleeding right after birth. It can be fatal quickly. The bleeding needs to be recognized, stopped, and the blood replaced rapidly.
The solution was clear to me: get blood to these patients. I started a foundation called the One Percent Project, which sourced donated blood and connected it to hospitals and patients who urgently needed transfusions but often struggled to access safe blood quickly enough.
When speaking to people at blood banks, I was made aware of bags of blood that were incinerated because they had expired.
This was a shocker. In a system where you assume there are only shortages, you actually also have a surplus. This was a supply, a distribution, and a coordination problem. People weren’t effectively communicating with each other. Technology can help with that.
We launched LifeBank as a platform to coordinate blood supply in January 2016.
What did you focus on first?