The founder and Chief Executive Officer of LifeBank, a medical distribution company that uses data and technology to help health workers discover essential medical products across Africa, Temie Giwa-Tubosun, has won the Cartier Women’s Initiative grant of $100,000.
Development Diaries gathered that Giwa-Tubosun, whose dedication to LifeBank has resulted in the saving of more than 8,000 lives, got the grant after emerging as 2020 Laureate for Sub-Saharan Africa at the Cartier Women’s Initiative awards.
Giwa-Tubosun’s LifeBank, founded in 2016, brings medical supplies, including blood, to people who need them.
Her outfit also delivers products like emergency medical oxygen cannisters, platelets, plasma, and vaccines.
‘This is what I was meant to do with my life. I feel a sense of calling while solving this problem,’ she said in an interview published on the Cartier Women’s Initiative website.
‘We help hospitals find critical supplies and deliver them in the right condition and on time, round the clock, in three cities in Nigeria.’
Speaking further, she said, ‘I found out that about 34 percent of all maternal deaths in Africa are from postpartum hemorrhage. Basically, a mother gives birth and then she starts bleeding, and within a couple of hours she [was] dead. Although I did [not] have postpartum hemorrhage myself, I felt it was such a huge cause of maternal death that if we could solve this we would save a lot of mothers’.
With the aforementioned grant from the Cartier Women’s Initiative, the Nigerian is expected to strengthen the capability of LifeBank to save more lives.
The initiative, which is open to women-run and women-owned businesses across the world, was founded in 2006 to help women reach their full potential.
The annual international entrepreneurship programme spotlights women’s achievements, while providing them with the necessary financial, social and human capital support in growing their businesses and leadership skills.
Sources: BellaNaija Cartier Women’s initiative
Photo source: BellaNaija
