African HealthTech 2.0 Twitter (or X by the slave name) is a mess. I have tried to post this thread as separate tweets for over an hour. Here it is now in one big lump, which I hate. I have separated the paragraphs to make them more readable. This should have been a Medium or Substack article. It may become one. I don't regret my earlier "African HealthTech is the new fintech" tweet; I believe it, but it seems people are trying to make that happen with frivolous ventures. Investors are also now jumping into the new frothiness because the stored dry powder has to go elsewhere before LPs ask. People now even put my tweets in their decks! LOL! My cousin told me this, and I laughed. I need to send those people my @Calendly link to “discuss” it. 😂 That single thread also led to the rabbit hole of telemedicine conversations and altercations here as everyone started showing their true colors with daggers drawn to protect interests. This is my point again - There are immense innovation opportunities in African healthcare, and HealthTech is a massive African opportunity "IF" done right. In my earlier tweets, I emphasized prevention, but it was lost in translation and some MedBro's "agenda." Data is also a critical part of this puzzle. Healthcare starts with nutrition, exercise, and hygiene. Those colonial sanitary inspectors at the time of my grandparents were not foolish. They suffered so much themselves and learned how to hack living with African risks by taking simple precautions. I was on the board of @MAZAHealth and saw things that were not immediately obvious, just from building a NOT-for-profit emergency service for pregnant women in Northern Ghana using tricycles. The Data gathered was a treasure trove, and I have spoken about it a lot here and how it unlocked so many things, even for fintech. Healthtech and Fintech have many parallels and overlaps. People should learn from each other and have healthy conversations. I have been on both sides and seen the overlaps. This is why I encourage people to read the book "The Medici Effect." When we started rebuilding our tech company (@swiftasystems) after we failed the first time, I moved away from building new products because we couldn't compete with the resources those who had built established products deployed in the enterprise market. These people were building massive products for large enterprises like banks and telcos. The small merchants and SMEs were ignored until African fintech happened. We opted for support services at the time. It was a gap. Support depends on people, and we trained a lot of engineers to deliver it. It allowed us to remain alive and thrive until we started building products again for the right market and at the right time. By the time we got into building fintech products, we also saw that in a place without infrastructure, fintechs were always going to struggle. We learned from telco. Telcos saw that the most abundant resource in Africa was people, and they built their distribution on them first, and the revenue from that distribution allowed them to build infrastructure. We applied that to fintech with agent networks and built the first independent agent network in Africa called MATS. Healthcare in Africa is not different from telco or fintech. It needs to first build on people when there is no infrastructure, doctors are leaving, and drugs are almost all imported. Bad things happen, but most bad things are preventable with basic education and care. I was listening to a talk @obi was giving on @fedibtc and how they built on communities because people trust their communities first, and I jumped up saying this is it!! It was another Eureka moment for me. Fintech agents were a community function. Healthcare agents are the same. @WellaHealth seems to be one of the few that has caught on to this. They are democratizing health insurance at the community level using people. Many other things can be built on top of this once it becomes a solid network. Community health was not a fad in colonial times. Community and family health is where the tech in African HealthTech has to begin gaining mass traction. It is not in hospitals or doctors. It is in the community and the data that they can gather about themselves and the knowledge they learn on how they can help each other. It is not sexy or easily monetizable, but I think that is where the interface with existing community-based fintech or things like @fedibtc comes in. Innovation is not an Island. You have to build on what was already successful. Also, learn from their mistakes as well. African Healthtech 2.0 is African Fintech 3.0; they’re intertwined at the community level. This is what I want to discuss with serious founders. Also, follow @docneto and @aproko_doctor. I love what @aproko_doctor is for awareness; a community will make it all come together.