Lifesten health, a local tech startup has scooped $250,000 in cash prize during HealthTech Investor Summit that took place at Norrsken Kigali House on December 13. The tech-enabled start up develops incentive-based health and wellness programs to help people adopt healthy behavior to prevent non-communicable diseases through a Mobile App The summit was a side event of Conference on Public Health in Africa (CPHIA) taking place in Kigali from December 13 to 15 which was officially opened by Prime Minister Edouard Ngirente on Tuesday. The young innovator, Peace Ndoli, the founder of Lifesten health, who had emerged as the overall winner of this year’s Hanga Pitchfest, again scooped an award for her Cardiovascular HealthTech Innovation for Kigali during the Health Tech Hub Africa Gala Dinner-Awards ceremony for 2023 cohort that was sponsored by Novartis Foundation. The HealthTech Hub Africa is a hybrid pan-African health tech accelerator with a physical co-working and community space in Kigali founded by the Novartis Foundation at the Norrsken House Kigali which facilitates innovators and entrepreneurs. Novartis Foundation is an organisation that aims to improve the health of low-income populations by working with local authorities and partners to re-engineer health systems from being reactive to proactive, predictive, and preventative. Speaking to The New Times, she said the cash prize will help expand operations in preventing non-communicable diseases and particularly implementing a project to fight against cardiovascular diseases in Kigali city. “We are going to do more about our Kigali city project. With the money, we are going to increase the diagnostics for high blood pressure. We will try to get as many people as possible and increase the number of screenings in the country,” she said. She said that the operations will increase awareness about hypertension and also get more people to know about their status when it comes to blood pressure. Once people know their status, she said, they will be referred to the right organizations or clinics to manage their cases. “We have to also deploy agents to teach people how to screen using the Mobile Phone App in the city of Kigali through an outreach programme,” she said adding they target to expand the service across the country. Other African Health startups that were awarded include an Ethiopian startup YeneHealth FemTech PLC- a virtual health and care technology that got a $50,000 prize. GIC Space startup from Cameroon which fights Breast cancer secured $30,000 prize while Dochtus startup from Algeria that provides virtual health and care technology got $20,000 prize. Over 40 startups contested and are set to be connected to various investors and get support from different partners. Dr. Ann Aerts, Head of Novartis Foundation said that the initiative is an opportunity for the local innovators and startups to connect with investors and attract much more funding than they expected. “We bring the startups together, with interested investors in the space of Health Tech. Health technology in public health has to equally look at how we change the way we deliver health services around the World, and this is why this Health Tech has to be integrated in public health. There is much more funding for tech solutions in finance than in healthcare, and we need to change that,” she added. In less than six months, the first first Cohort 2022 of 30 startups from 10 African countries raised over $7 million in funding, helped over 600,000 people on the continent, and created over 100 new jobs in HealthTech.
