I Love June💃🏿😎! Let's Talk About Africa's Pharm Startups, Being Consistent And More!
Let's Talk About The Attention Pharmacy Startups Are Attracting In Africa, Becoming Comfortable With Being Consistent, And Updates On A New Product We Are Building + A Few Talks About AI!
Welcome to another edition of Unbounded!
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I use Unbounded to share my learning (some of the things I am building and doing) and curiosity and connect with other writers and learners.
June is my month.
Yes!
My month!
I celebrated my birthday yesterday.
And every year, I try to recalibrate in June.
Take honest stock of where I am coming from, where I am and where I am going.
Accountability, responsibility and looking into the future are some of the things I have been seriously thinking about lately.
How can we be more accountable, especially in our personal lives—with the resources we have, the people under our care, and our families?
How can we be more responsible?
Plus, how can we prepare for the future?
Time is moving extremely fast.
Sometimes, I wish it were possible to use every second we've and not waste one pinch of it.
Sighs! More on this, though, later.
Today, I will be briefly writing about:
The attention African pharmacy startups are attracting.
Becoming Comfortable With Being Consistent.
Exciting updates on a new product we're building.
And a few thoughts and talks about how AI continues to invade our daily lives and how we can adjust.
The Rise Of Africa's Pharmacy Startups
Pharmacists are increasingly taking on more impactful frontline roles in healthcare delivery in Africa.
They are going beyond just dispensing drugs to become a vital link in the continent's healthcare ecosystem.
In Africa, community pharmacies are everywhere.
Most of them have gradually and quietly evolved into mini-clinics that surprisingly cater to the community's basic medical needs.
People go to the pharmacies to get treatment for malaria and body aches, and they also act as a vital channel for sexual and reproductive health.
In communities, we see pharmacies that have small rooms for consultations, sometimes with pharmacists, technicians, or community nurses, and attached is a small lab equipped to handle basic laboratory inquiries, such as pregnancy tests, malaria tests, and blood sugar tests.
Africa may benefit from expanding the roles of pharmacists and their capabilities, considering the shortage of physicians and nurses in Africa due to brain drain. We are already seeing this becoming a possibility, with pharmacy-centred technologies attracting attention from investors.
Recently, i3 (Investing Innovation Africa), an accelerator largely backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, invested approximately $225,000 exclusively in pharmacy-focused health tech startups for its 2025 cohort.
This strategic move is a strong indicator of the direction health tech ecosystem investment in Africa might be heading in the future.
Investors are now seeking solutions that have a genuine impact and deliver value and profit. The days of free money are over.
It's a great time to build a pharmacy startup in Africa, especially if your solution actively addresses a real-world problem.
Our government also needs to invest more in community pharmacies. To make the care people receive in these communities safe, there needs to be strict regulations that guide the operations of community pharmacies.
Let it be that care is rendered by professional pharmacists, technicians or whoever is available to attend to people seeking basic medical help.
In Other Words, Sadly, Nigeria's Medsaf Has Shut Down!
Medsaf was among the first pharmacy startups in Nigeria to pioneer the digital supply chain revolution.
Unfortunately, due to mounting internal pressures and a plethora of challenges that they couldn't surmount, they are finally closing the door.
Medsaf pioneered the digitisation of medicine procurement in Nigeria.
One would have thought that they would have become a major player in the sub-ecosystem by now.
Citing a failed acquisition process, amongst other challenges, the CEO, Vivian Nwakah, stated that the company could no longer run in an official email.
Medsaf's fall or failure has many lessons for healthtech startups in Africa.
If Medsaf were a Fintech startup, it would definitely have survived the hard time it found itself in (my opinion).
The company faced challenges it didn't have control over, particularly the sudden deterioration of Nigeria's foreign exchange at a crucial period of the company's operations.
There were also other deep internal issues, as stated by the CEO, particularly about having the wrong team.
Upcoming startups in the pharma-tech ecosystem can look to Medsaf and learn from its mistakes, hopefully avoiding them.
Building startups in Africa is tough, especially if you're building outside of FinTech or FoodTech!
And if you're building in HealthTech, you need to put in even more effort because we haven't yet fully opened up to healthcare technologies in Africa.
However, I firmly believe that the era of healthcare technology innovations, especially digital technology-driven healthcare innovations in Africa, is coming back stronger than the pseudo-revolution we had intra and post-COVID, where innovation was primarily driven by factors not strong enough to drive long-term innovations.
And artificial intelligence is the fuel and catalyst.
There are numerous ways we can utilise AI in digital health technologies, from health education and administration to simplifying and improving processes.
We may not yet have solid infrastructures to support world-class artificial intelligence solutions, but we have enough resources to at least build solutions that can have a significant impact.
Becoming Comfortable With Being Consistent
"You've to become comfortable with pain, discipline, and being doggedly consistent."
Nobody can wish consistency upon themselves.
If that were possible, I think everybody would be successful or great—everybody!
Who doesn't want to be consistent or disciplined?
We all want it.
We desire and wish.
However, desire and wishes are not enough to take us from point A to B.
You need to put in enough effort and energy commensurate with the degree of success or greatness you're pursuing.
You see, laziness is an option, and many people will continue to choose it. Not because they really want to be lazy, but simply because they have not yet reached the point where they are comfortable with pain, consistency, and discipline.
If you do not reach a point where discipline and consistency become part of you, then I am afraid to let you know that there are degrees of success, achievements, and performance that you will never be able to attain and maintain.
It's painful every day.
Every single day.
Showing up is not entirely enjoyable because your joints will ache, and you'll get tired and feel like giving up.
However, what differentiates the one who stays from the one who gives up is their ability to become comfortable with being consistent.
They know where they are going, and their vision always remains before them.
Can you become comfortable with being consistent? Yes, you definitely can. It all entirely depends on you.
How much do you want to see that vision become real?
There is no special genetic trait that makes a person better at being consistent or disciplined.
Nobody is born with the ability to be consistent.
We all must work and labour towards becoming and remaining consistent.
“The pain you experience is the price you pay to build the character you want. Patience is built through delay. Consistency is built through boredom. Toughness is built through suffering. It’s not punishment. It’s the only way to become the person you said you wanted to become.”
— Alex Hormozi.
On Artificial Intelligence And How We Can Adapt, Adjust And Evolve
All the major tech companies are constantly discussing how artificial intelligence will replace many jobs in the future.
They have replaced thousands of roles already with "agents." —smart algorithms that can show fundamental reasoning capacities, plan and make certain decisions on behalf of users, have a memory and possess a certain degree of autonomy, and can learn and adapt.
AI Agents can process multimodal information, such as text, voice, audio, and even code. They can converse, reason, learn, and make intelligent decisions with very little or almost no human involvement.
They can learn over time and handle basic business transactions. They can even work with other agents and coordinate complex workflows.
What we're seeing is the replacement of an entire segment of the human workforce.
The entry-level is practically being wiped out before our eyes!
Most companies are already employing massively employing the services of AI agents. They are cheaper, better at following instructions, do not revolt, and do not have the many infirmities that plague human workers.
Work, as we know it, is changing radically, and for us to survive, we must be able to adjust, adapt and evolve.
We Can't Hide Our Heads In The Sand
It's happening, and it's not an experiment. AI may not be perfect yet, but it has already demonstrated that it excels at most of the basic tasks we can perform and is improving rapidly.
AI has come to stay, and the only thing we can do now is to accommodate it and learn how to live with it.
Those who refuse to embrace it wholeheartedly will be left behind in time.
And what does it even mean to embrace AI?
An Exoskeleton For Your Mind
Or like the Iron Man suit/armour.
Most of us should know Ironman.
Tony Stark, the Marvel character.
Rich, genius, billionaire arms dealer who has these amazing advanced suits that enable him to fly and perform all sorts of extraordinary feats that are impossible ordinarily.
That's what AI is going to do for us. That's for those who are ready to embrace it as an advanced tool, assistant (maybe companion).
AI is like Tony Stark's Iron Man suit, which enhances his physical abilities beyond imagination. What he wouldn't be able to do naturally, he can do it because of his suit.
With the help of AI, we can accomplish tasks that we wouldn't normally be able to do with our bare minds while preserving our natural skills and abilities.
AI would allow us to focus on the core of creativity while it handles the mundane and repetitive tasks that drain our energy, and it can also help our creativity flow easily.
Sometimes, when I'm stuck at a point, a simple question to ChatGPT helps me clear my mind and keep the creative juices flowing. So, instead of waiting for days for an idea to flow, I cut the time with AI, get the idea flowing, and even do much more.
AI Is Going To Be Like An Addictive Drug
While we discuss the importance and usefulness of AI, we must also acknowledge its darker aspects, such as the potential for overdependence on AI.
We will reach a point where most people will be unable to harness their creativity without AI, and that's particularly true for those who abuse or misuse it.
AI can actually cut you off from your creative essence if you don't know how to use it, and this is, unfortunately, going to be the fate of many young people who didn't have the opportunity to exercise their raw, natural creative abilities before AI became mainstream.
For most of us, the older generations, we didn't meet AI, so we were able to understand how to use our natural talents and creativity without AI, and when AI came, we had the double advantage of mastering our creativity while also understanding how to integrate AI such that even if AI is taken out of the picture we can still function properly as creators.
Overdependence on AI will pose a significant challenge in the future, and we can begin to address this by implementing guardrails to help people maintain their creativity and not view AI as a replacement for everything.
Next week, I will write about how AI is poised to revolutionise the emerging industry of remote workers, including virtual assistants, data professionals, customer support specialists, designers, and writers (some), and how Africa is likely to be the region most significantly impacted by this sudden shift.
We were just beginning to enjoy the boom of these virtual markets🥲!
Exciting Updates On Our Product We've Been Building
To close today's letter!
I wanted to give you a heads-up about our product we've been developing at Carecode Digital Health Hub.
Sometimes, I discuss some of the projects I'm handling in the background.
Our Learning Management System, designed to educate Africa’s healthcare professionals about digital health (tools, skills, and more), is in development, and we're excited about it!
We're integrating AI into it to make learning even easier.
This project is one so dear to our hearts. We've spent a lot of time and resources on it and are among the first teams in Africa to attempt something of this nature.
Before the end of the year, we should have had our MVP ready, and by next year, full launch!
I am so excited about the possibilities.
If you want to be in the loop, you can subscribe to Unbounded, I always share updates here, or you can subscribe directly to The Digital Health Report, Carecode Digital Health Substack newsletter here; we share direct updates there, plus a lot of interesting information, news, ideas and reports about the digital health ecosystem.
If you're interested in partnering, sponsoring or building with us, you're very welcome!
Please send me a direct message here [daniel.ayinla@carecityonline.com] and let me know how we can collaborate.
Catch you soon (either this weekend or next week).
I always look forward to reading your writings. For me, the highlight of this writing is the tragic end of Medsaf and being comfortable with being consistent.
Weldone also for the amazing work done in Care Code Digital Health. I can't wait to access the learning feature when it's out.