The long road to health insurance for all — Why MFS Africa is investing in Inclusivity Solutions.
It is no longer a secret that “old” financial services such as health insurance can be reinvented into new, simple, relevant, and accessible services through technology. What is less known is how much more understanding of the customers’ social, economic and cultural realities is needed to bring those services to scale. Inclusivity Solutions does this particularly well by elegantly combining their cutting-edge technology with truly human centric design in Kenya, Cote d’Ivoire, and Rwanda. And that is why we are so proud to partner with them to scale health insurance products across Africa. You can read the full announcement here.
We know how hard Inclusivity Solutions mission is, because we have experienced it first-hand.
In the early 2010s, the Republic of Mali had one of the highest birth rates, and the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world. In the absence of proper savings channels, the costs of childbirth could quickly exhaust a family’s income. Many women were forced to rely on informal self-help groups for savings. Mali also had a high maternal mortality rate, with almost 0.6% of women dying due to childbirth. At that time, Mali ranked 165th of 181 countries[1], with one of the highest maternal mortality rates and the deadliest regions for a woman to bear a child.
At MFS Africa, we believe these kinds of problems can be alleviated by innovative mobile technology applied with smart process engineering. To deliver on our belief, we partnered with Orange Mali, PSI and NSIA to bring TIN NOGOYA to Mali women — a mobile phone-based pregnancy health insurance coverage that combines a savings account with health insurance to cover the cost of treatment for common childbirth complications. Pregnant women could conveniently subscribe to the service from their Orange Mali mobile phone and contribute monthly through their Orange Money account. This would allow Malian women to give birth in hospital without worrying about the cost, and thus hopefully reduce the dreadful mortality rate.
I founded MFS Africa to enable these kinds of products and to watch the impact that they can have on the lives of millions. Unfortunately, 18 months into the partnership we nearly ran out of cash and had to make tough choices about which products to focus on[2]. To survive, we needed to rapidly scale the MFS Africa Hub and we had to focus all our energy and resources on few simple and scalable use cases. Insurance didn’t make the list. It was too early and too hard to scale.
This remains one of the most heartbreaking decision I have had to make at MFS Africa.
The good news is that in the past seven years, many great entrepreneurs have continued to work relentlessly on combining technology, processes, and capital smartly to make preventable health tragedies, like women dying in childbirth, a thing of the past. One of these entrepreneurs is Jeremy Leach, Founder and CEO of Inclusivity Solutions, whom I met for the first time in 2007 when he was running FinMark Trust in South Africa. I could barely understand his Jersey’s accent, but I could feel his passion and was impressed by how comfortable he was challenging everything and everybody directly. We lost touch for a few years, but when I left MTN to start MFS Africa in 2010, Jeremy was the first person to contact me. During a four-hour breakfast at La Bottega in Johannesburg’s leafy Parkhurst neighborhood, I listened to him share his vision. Jeremy convinced me that insurance was much more than something you need if you own a car and have to bribe police if you don’t have it (this was my understanding of insurance growing up in Benin). At the end, I was sold, and insurance became part of our broad portfolio of services.
Since that breakfast, Jeremy and I have collaborated on several projects, from mi-Life in Ghana, to Adamjee Life in Pakistan, exploring and experimenting on how mobile and mobile money can transform insurance business models and provide a much-needed safety net for hundreds of millions of people in emerging markets. In late 2014, a few months after MFS Africa exited insurance, Jeremy invited me back to La Bottega to tell me that he was considering starting Inclusivity Solutions to focus on using technology to bring simple health and life insurance products to African consumers. I told him then and still believe till now, that he is one of the few individuals in the world who has the heart, the head, and the hands[3]to tackle this problem.
We at MFS Africa believe that health insurance is not only a much-needed safety net in times like the one we are living, but it is also a fundamental human right. That is why we dare to dream of an Africa with health insurance for all in our lifetime. We continue to be inspired by Jeremy and his team’s commitment to their mission of making this dream come true. They understand the difficulties of the mission yet have stayed the course. They understand that they may still be many turns and setbacks on the road, but they have what it takes to travel it. And we know that, when the world finally gets to that promised land, Inclusivity Solutions will be counted as one of the team that got us there. We look forward to working with them to not only make it safer to give birth in Mali, but to get us to the promised land: Health insurance for all in Africa.
[1]UNICEF 2015
[2]You can read more about these tough choices in an upcoming case study by MIT’s Sloan
[3]Expression borrowed from our friends at Goodwell Investments.
