Slide Safe: Innovation changing Nigeria’s healthcare sector

Florida Uzoaru is the founder of Slide Safe, a digital health start-up that provides self-health test kits for Nigerians.
Florida also provides water-based lubricants, Hepatitis B health test kits, pregnancy test kit, morning after-pill and other products for sexually transmitted infections (STIs).
Like most modern start-ups, the customer base of Slide Safe is mostly online. The customers/ clients place orders online and have the requested products delivered at their homes.
Florida was inspired to establish Slide Safe to help uplift sex education and various birth control measures in the country. According to her, most parents find it difficult to discuss sex and birth control with their children, resulting in high rate of youth failure in having healthy sex lives.
“I recognised that there was a barrier in getting hold of sexual health products. It’s not that these products aren’t available, or they need to be manufactured, but that the roads to them are narrow and thorny because of the stigmatisation attached to them in our society among young people,” she said.
“I always like to give an example of myself as a young girl. I was a curious girl. Even before I became active, I was very curious about boys. My mom was not willing to talk about it. My dad was very hostile about it – extremely protective,” she said.
“I wished so much I had someone I could have spoken to about sex and sexual health products when I was of age.
To change this for other young people, Florida established Slide Safe in 2016.
“One of the ways to change this is ensuring that people have privacy in buying Safe Slide products. We also try to make our packaging as discreet as possible. And when we talk to customers, we try to really calm them down if they have any fears, and we reassure them that there is really nothing to worry about. We want to get people to develop a lifestyle of sexual health and make them stay STD negative,” the young entrepreneur said.
She started her business with funds she got from personal savings and is yet to obtain any loan from deposit money bank. Since starting the business, Florida has been able to grow her business using various social media platforms for email marketing and campaigns.
The master’s degree holder in Public Health and Policy told Start-Up Digest that societal acceptance of her business has remained the major challenge the business is facing.
“The biggest problem I got, to be honest, is people being uncomfortable with my products. I remember the early days when I started trying to get Slide Safe packs into hotels. I got a lot of push backs. People didn’t want any association with sex products, even though what we are actually doing is sexual health,” she stated.
“In the beginning, my family were very uncomfortable with my business – and the way I’m always talking about sex. But now, they are used to it. They have bought into my vision,” the health entrepreneur added.

She urged the government to establish various free STD testing centres across the country and also organise mass campaigns about sexual safety, not just for HIV alone, stating that this would help reduce the rate of sexually transmitted diseases in the country.
She told Start-Up Digest that her business is focused on youths between the ages of 18 and 35 years owing to the fact that most people within the age group have multiple sex partners, which increases their risk of getting STDs or having unintended pregnancy.
When asked about the role digital health can play in transforming Nigeria’s healthcare sector, Florida noted that there has been a lot of move towards digital health in the country recently because of the rate of privacy involved and cost reduction in accessing the services and products.

“If you can ensure people’s privacy, and they feel their health information is protected, they feel more comfortable to try services they were initially scared of trying.
She said technology has played a key role in cutting down the cost of accessing healthcare services in Nigeria.
“One of the popular feedbacks I get from those who use our packs is that it’s easier getting the packs delivered to them than having to go to hospitals. If they were to go to hospitals, there is a transportation fare to and fro and there is a wait time at the hospital but technology solves all these problems,” she said.
Florida stated that she will be glad to expand the number of test Slide Safe packs. “Right now, we are only testing for 3 STDs/STIs – HIV, hepatitis B and syphilis. The expansion is to do more diseases/infections – chlamydia, herpes, gonorrhoea,” Florida said.

When asked what her advice to other entrepreneurs is, she said, “Get into an accelerator program, if you can. They are very helpful. I also had the opportunity of going through Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship and Adansonia program. All of them were incredibly insightful, and helped me understand what running a business is about.”
She said if she had got into an entrepreneurship programme early in life, she would not have made some of her mistakes.
“An entrepreneur needs to be open to testing and retesting. You’d have to test your business model, confirm your assumptions of what you think will work, and if it doesn’t work, move on quickly and test out another assumption. You have to keep testing till you find out what works best for your business,” Florida added.

Josephine Okojie