Temie Giwa-Tubosun: The Social Entrepreneur Supporting Nigeria’s Fight Against COVID-19
Temie Giwa-Tubosun is the founder and CEO of LifeBank Nigeria, a medical distribution company that aims to improve access to essential medical supplies in Nigerian and African hospitals.
Their goal is to save one million African lives by delivering medical products like blood, blood products, oxygen, and vaccines to hospitals across Africa.
So far, Temie Giwa-Tubosun’s LifeBank is working steadily with their eyes on the prize – LifeBank has moved 23477 medical products, served 1135 hospitals, and saved over nine thousand lives.
In supporting the fight against COVID-19, Giwa-Tubuson through LifeBank built two drive-through mobile testing centres to address the low testing numbers in Nigeria.
In an interview with CNN, Giwa-Tubosun revealed that the inspiration to begin the mobile test centres came when she decided that not enough people were being tested for the virus. She said:
“I read too much about the virus and got anxious. I realized that testing was a problem so I started to think up ways to get more people tested for the virus.”
The free drive-through test centres are located in Lagos and Oyo and were launched in partnership with the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research (NIMR).
As COVID-19 cases continued to rise and stretch Nigeria’s already fragile healthcare system, Lifebank also created Quip, where frontline Nigerian hospitals can find critical equipment when needed.
Through the initiative, staff and volunteers call hospitals across Nigeria to record the availability of medical equipment vital to the treatment of COVID-19, such as respirators, ventilators, and ICU beds. LifeBank then engaged volunteers to repair damaged hospital equipment. The company is taking this initiative to Kenya and hopes to further expand to Ghana and Ethiopia.
She said:
“We want the database to be available so that they (government agencies) can reach out to the private sector and strike out deals with them regarding the equipment they need.”
Additionally, LifeBank is providing round the clock oxygen deliveries to Lagos isolation centres. The medical distribution company also created an app called Safe Hands, with which they intermittently remind users to wash their hands, and display how to properly wash hands, etc.
Temie Giwa-Tubosun further explained that her company is not making a profit from its work around coronavirus, but receives its reward in creating solutions that contain the pandemic.
“I didn’t have plans to do anything around Covid-19 when it first started, but I read too much about it and started having nightmares about ventilators and the virus. The next day I called the team and we got to work.”
Temie Giwa-Tubosun was honoured in Neusroom’s list of People, Organisations, Countries, and Things helping the world fight COVID-19. See the full list here.
