Anike Lawal: Connecting mothers to doctors through technology
Many entrepreneurs are driven by a passion to solve societal problems. For Anike Lawal, chief operating officer of Mamalette, her driving force is to address issues with maternal health using the power of technology.
Through her online platform, Anike established a local health network for mothers in Africa by helping them find the right information needed for their daily maternal development.
Anike was inspired to establish Mamalette owing to her first experience as a mother. During her first pregnancy, the young entrepreneur was in dire need of a health platform to seek answers to questions on maternal health. Lack of such prompted her to establish Mamalette in 2013.
“When I was pregnant with my first child, I looked for a community of other women in the same situation. Unable to find such a group, I decided to establish Mamalette,” Anike says.
“Today Mamalette is a thriving online network that connects pregnant women and new mothers to valuable, often life-saving information, both online and offline,” She explains.
She started her online platform with money raised from her personal savings and family members.
Anike tells Start-Up-Digest that her online platform has continued to remain in operations owing to its adoption of innovation to drive sustainability as well as prompt responses to users’ queries and suggestions. According to her, apt responses to queries and suggestions have helped her business grow.
“What makes us different is that we continue to innovate and listen carefully to what our users are saying,” she says.
Since starting, Mamalette online maternal health network has grown and has reached over 40,000 mothers monthly. Since inception, over a million people have visited the website.
Responding to questions on how the maternal health platform gets its doctors and other health personnel on board to provide responses to questions raised by mothers and would be mothers, she says Mamallete partners with medical practitioners and other experts.
Answering questions relating to challenges confronting her business, Anike explains that the huge infrastructural gaps have remained a major issue.
She also identifies the huge challenge involved in running a sustainable business in the country.
She tells Start-Up-Digest that her business has continued to attract partnerships which have helped the business to survive and grow despite enormous challenges.
She laments that poor power supply has continued to impact negatively on the business, hurting the business while raising operational costs.
She calls on the Federal Government to bridge the huge infrastructural gaps, saying that it will help increase the survival rate of start-ups in the country.
The young entrepreneur urges governments at all levels to create platforms for partnerships for entrepreneurs.
“Government should create more avenues for businesses like ours to partner with relevant government bodies, increase support and funding for new and innovative businesses like ours,” she notes.
On expansion plans, she says:
“Our goals are to increase the reach and impact of our work, and our focus now is to expand our health champions program.”
On the advice she is willing to offer other entrepreneurs, Anike says, “Start small and consistently work on your idea.”
Josephine Okojie