The Access Afya Manifesto
I wrote this back in 2014 when I was first building my Kenyan healthcare business. I wanted more than a mission statement. I wanted a shared vision of what healthcare could look like. This hung on our wall, was read outloud regularly, graced the front pages of our business plan and was handed to every new hire. Some of my investors thought it too wordy, but when I look back on this I smile. It infused my personality into my company, it made people pause and think about the big picture, and it still sounds like something I would write today if you asked me to reflect on the future of healthcare.
Why I’m sharing this: To start to share how writing can help startups build more efficiently.
We Believe
The current health paradigm, where people go see experts in buildings when they are sick, is changing. This paradigm shift is especially important in the developing world, where need is greater because of an extreme under provision of real, functional health care.
The core components of the new health care paradigm will be digital and/or point of care measurement and diagnostics, “task-shifting” or getting community members more involved in care, standardization of things that can be standardized, distributed health, on-demand and mobile health.
Technology fuels this model, making more possible at the point of care and linking data from operations, clinical encounters, outcomes and satisfaction. We are a tech-savvy, data driven health company and are completely focused on adapting digital health to underserved communities.
This only works in an environment where care providers want to be part of a change and patients feel like they they can trust them. Access Afya is starting here, creating this environment, and then working our way up.
To create change in a meaningful way, we must be agile but thoughtful, ready learn from data to build better human interactions, and resilient. This is hard work, but we believe worthwhile work and we are ready to take on the challenge.
Thanks for joining.