NewTech Friday: DanAid – Offering low cost health cover in West Africa
Fabrice Mbanga is the CEO and Founder of DanAid, an innovative insurtech created in Cameroon that enables low-income populations to have access to an affordable health insurance service.
Fabrice Mbanga is the CEO and Founder of DanAid, an innovative insurtech created in Cameroon that enables low-income populations to have access to an affordable health insurance service.
What led to the creation of DanAid?
Healthcare access is a universal problem, and in Cameroon as in the rest of West Africa, patients must pay for all their healthcare needs out of pocket and upfront. This in a country where 71% of households are poor (i.e. living on less than €5 daily). Family heads having to choose between food on the table and healthcare often opt to delay, skip, or forgo care for their loved ones, with often disastrous consequences. There are countless stories of patient who died at hospital gates while the family was hustling for money to get the care started. There are also countless stories of hospitals who resort to imprisoning women and babies for months until the family can reimburse care expenses.
Although I had always been acutely aware of the problem, the decision to start DanAid has been a slow awareness rather than a sudden epiphany. My father was a nurse. As I was growing up, I could notice people visiting our home to request various healthcare services in the hope of saving some money from dreaded hospital visits. I later worked three years as a pharmaceutical firm representative in Cameroon. In this capacity, I visited hundreds of healthcare organizations, meeting with thousands of doctors, nurses and pharmacists across the country. I was able to form a deep insight into the inner workings of the healthcare industry in Cameroon, combining both the users’ and providers’ perspective.
It was however not until my father – who had just retired – fell sick that I was thrust into action. He then faced important regular healthcare costs he was unable to pay. He did not have health insurance and his financial means could not meet his growing needs. We researched and experimented with most of the available solutions to support him, from the prohibitive health insurance solutions he was now barred from, to saving schemes he could by no means afford. What worked for us was my seven siblings and myself, spread over the world, deciding to pull resources to meet his and my mother’s healthcare needs. We made sure money was always just a phone call away for the care of my father through his 13 years long care. He passed in November 2016. I truly believed that timely access to money had helped add years to his life and could do the same to millions more. I started DanAid to bring my family’s experience to others.
When it comes to healthcare, we all want to make sure our loved ones are taken care of. But oftentimes, the costs can be prohibitive. Why then would only 2% of the population in Cameroon choose to get the most effective solution for this widespread a worry? It was puzzling that only 2% of the population in Cameroon has healthcare insurance. We consequently started conversing with people. We interviewed over 30,000 family heads in Cameroon and the key reason for this low penetration was clearly the high cost of health insurance solutions offered by the traditional insurance companies. We also identified trust and cultural issues with the mutual health organizations. The saving schemes families resort to do not prevent them from dreading sickness, as every hospital visit is always a setback and a possible return to an even poorer life. There was therefore a gap in the market for a solution that is both affordable, quick and of good quality.
DanAid intends to fill this gap. These experiences had however taught me that my solution could not just be a cheap insurance company. The whole care and claims processes had to be rediscovered and rebuilt in a new and innovative way to promote quality, accessibility and efficiency.
DanAid was thus started in July 2019, because a conducive environment had emerged to introduce a new business model for risk pooling in healthcare.
• Mobile phone penetration reached yet unseen heights in both rural and urban areas.
• Internet access and mobile payments systems gained widespread use.
• The health insurance industry remained unfit.
• The healthcare system remained manual, offering vast improvement opportunities.
• The legal landscape remained open to any solution.
Could you present DanAid’s offer?
DanAid offers mobile health plans for underserved families in Africa.
We have built an app and a suite of services that allow family members to receive optimized health plans for any budget. Family heads define what amount they can afford to pay as monthly premium, as low as €1/month, our system helps generate an optimized care plan to cover up to 80% of their healthcare costs and the family receives a care ceiling up to 100 times their ability to pay. Our solution builds on smart contracts and AI to deliver the money in near real time to the mobile wallet of care providers for a quick start of legitimate care to patients. The service is available everywhere there is access to mobile network.
We achieve this through a holistic and systematic approach that can unlock universal healthcare coverage through private initiative. DanAid’s solution includes:
• A mobile first health microinsurance service where every family can get an optimized health plan regardless of their budget.
• A digitalized care pathway to improve the quality of services through a long-term relationship with doctors.
• Digital care tools for video consultation, pharmacy marketplace and online access to other health services. This is aimed at improving access to equitable care.
What's coming next for DanAid?
We are completing a two-year pilot in Cameroon with 500 families (totaling about 1500 beneficiaries). This has demonstrated the market fit of our solution and its resilience. We are now seeking a €200,000 seed investment to go past break-even and achieve a leadership position in Cameroon within the next two years. At which point we plan to expand our service to 14 countries of the CIMA regulatory region in West Africa. These countries a have similar population profile, similar healthcare issues and a coordinated regulatory environment.
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