BeChangeMaker 2024 winners lay groundwork to accelerate healthcare access in Africa

In September 2024, during the WorldSkills Conference in Lyon, France, Sekofia, a groundbreaking software solution developed by Nigerian students Ochong Johnson Aduma and Nino Chibuzor Nwachukwu, emerged as the winner of BeChangeMaker 2024.

This innovative platform aims to tackle critical inefficiencies in Africa’s healthcare system by addressing administrative burdens and digitizing health insurance processes.

In Nigeria, where only 3% of the population has health insurance, the healthcare sector is overwhelmed by challenges. Insurance approval for a single hospital visit can take up to 12 hours, leading to delays in treatment and high out-of-pocket costs. Healthcare providers spend 40% of their time on non-clinical tasks, primarily validating insurance claims – a time-consuming process exacerbated by paper-based records that dominate 70% of health insurance operations.

These inefficiencies severely hinder efforts to expand universal healthcare coverage across Nigeria and the broader African region.

Sekofia offers a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform designed to connect patients, healthcare providers, and insurance companies in a unified ecosystem. The team is developing tailor-made applications for each of the groups that will streamline the process of health insurance management. It will allow insurance providers to efficiently manage users and get automated claims processing, health centres to enjoy easy patient verification and smoother claims submissions, and patients to experience easy access to health services and claims monitoring.

Initial tests showed they can reduce administrative workloads by 90% and cut patient waiting times by 95%. This transformative potential positions Sekofia as a critical tool for scaling universal health coverage in Africa.

Participating in the BeChangeMaker programme and presenting at the WorldSkills Conference has provided Sekofia with resources to accelerate their business. In addition to receiving 3,000 EUR in funding, the team gained access to post-program coaching and networking opportunities.

“This platform gave us the spotlight to tell our story and showcase the solution we’ve been passionately working on. The problems we’re solving are ones we’ve experienced firsthand, and it’s deeply personal for us,” says Nino.

Since presenting at the Conference, Sekofia’s founders report “very good strides,” and won other local and regional start-up accelerator programmes. The monetary rewards received as part of the awards are now enabling them to refine their product and organizational structure.

“We are currently setting up our corporate governance and our legal structure. So we’re working towards getting our solution and product patented and looking at different trademarks to protect our ideas and intellectual property,” says Nino.

Only 22 and 24 years of age, Nino and Ochong have just presented their final capstone project to become graduates from the African Leadership University in Rwanda and are soon to return to their home in Nigeria and start their ground operations.

Currently a team of seven, the group plans to expand in early 2025 by hiring additional engineers and data scientists, tapping into a network of talent built during their studies and experiences.

Their immediate focus is on building the hospital-facing side of the platform by March 2025, as hospitals serve as connectors between patients and insurance providers. In the second stage, Sekofia is looking to partner with a midsize health insurance provider to pilot its solution, and to have all their products up and running by the end of next year.

“Our plan is to fully double down in Nigeria by 2026, and we are thinking of expanding in Rwanda later on, as we have been based here for three years and we have quite a nuanced understanding of how the insurance market works,” explains Nino, while stressing that they have no intention of “rushing into new markets.”

“We want to make sure that whatever impact and metrics that we’re using to evaluate our product here in Nigeria we’re able to use that insight and information to effectively scale,” adds Nino.

BeChangeMaker is a social entrepreneurship programme powered by WorldSkills and the HP Foundation, with the collaboration of UNESCO-UNEVOC. Since 2017, it has supported skilled youth to take their business ideas to the next level and drive social impact.

Learn more about the finalists of BeChangeMaker 2024 and discover their insightful ideas by watching their final pitch.