₦airaland Forum

For more than a decade, fintech transformed Nigeria’s banking sector from frustrating queues, endless paperwork and delayed transactions into instant transfers, digital wallets and mobile banking convenience.

Now, analysts believe healthcare may be next.

According to growing conversations within Nigeria’s healthtech ecosystem, the country’s healthcare sector today resembles banking before the fintech boom around 2012, filled with inefficiency, fragmented systems and massive untapped demand waiting for disruption.

A recent analysis by Nigerian product professional Dolapo R. Fasakin argues that healthcare in Nigeria is quietly entering its own “fintech moment” and most Nigerians are not paying attention yet.

The comparison is striking.

Millions of Nigerians still struggle with poor access to healthcare, scattered patient records, expensive out of pocket medical bills and outdated hospital systems. In many cases, patients move from one hospital to another carrying paper files while paying huge costs directly from their pockets during emergencies.

But beneath these long standing problems, a silent digital revolution is already happening.

The First Wave
The first wave of Nigeria’s healthcare technology movement focused mainly on infrastructure and government ICT development between the 1980s and 2015.

The Second Wave
After the first wave came a second wave between 2016 and 2022, where startups introduced telemedicine, online pharmacies, diagnostics platforms and digital HMOs, especially during the COVID 19 pandemic.

However, many of those platforms mostly served urban smartphone users, while rural and lower income Nigerians remained excluded. Investor enthusiasm also slowed after the pandemic funding surge cooled down globally.

The Third Wave
Now, experts say a third wave is emerging and this one may change everything.

The new focus is shifting toward AI driven healthcare intelligence, health financing, digital pharmacies, patient owned medical records, predictive healthcare systems, medicine logistics and preventive care.

One major opportunity lies in health financing. Although Nigeria’s National Health Insurance Authority Act technically supports wider insurance coverage, millions of Nigerians still rely heavily on direct cash payments for healthcare.

This gap is creating opportunities for startups to build flexible systems that fit how ordinary Nigerians actually earn and spend money.

Perhaps the most surprising argument is that the people likely to transform Nigerian healthcare may not even be doctors.

Instead, they may be engineers, pharmacists, product designers, fintech founders and data scientists building systems around real Nigerian realities.

And just like fintech transformed banking years ago, whoever solves healthcare access, trust and affordability at scale could define the next generation of African billion dollar companies.

Dpharmacist:
Experts Says Nigeria’s Next Billion Dollar Revolution May Come From Healthcare

https://www./nigerias-healthcare-where-banking-2012-most-people-dolapo-r--jkpde

InvertedHammer:
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It is by far better than Enugu.

500 gallons of water go for N20k. Multiply by 4 in a month, that's N80k. By extrapolation, that's N960k in a year on water alone. Why? Because the governor believes that clean and accessible water is the least of his worries. Yet they prance around like Enugu is Abuja even though the red muddy soil will have residents looking like they went tomb-raiding at night.

But then, considering where it was before Peter Mba, one can understand the accolades being that he moved the town from 16th Century to 17th Century but not anywhere near 20th Century. 21st Century is a stretch. EEDC? The worst of all.

/

fergie001:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5v-F81hNTs

The Permanent Secretary, Office of Drainage Services and Water Resources in Lagos State, Mahmood Adegbite, has said that people drilling borehole in the Lekki axis of the state is probably drinking ‘’shit water.”

While speaking at a stakeholders meeting in the state recently, Adegbite noted that contaminated boreholes in Lekki pose health risk and added that treatment of waste water would eradicate any form of disease that may arise from it.

He said, “On waste water treatment, I will say that everyone digging borehole within the Lekki axis is probably drinking what I will call ‘shit water.’

https://punchng.com/video-everyone-digging-borehole-in-lekki-is-probably-drinking-shit-water-lagos-govt/?fbclid=IwQ0xDSwMABDJjbGNrAwAEK2V4dG4DYWVtAjExAAEewOd7728C0FSKQJNWar4yKRxNpNKt1owSlw47y57FKAux2QxvQL24Iu18rtw_aem_3kB5Sd2GjpdqjN6zFuIs7w

Dpharmacist:
Experts Says Nigeria’s Next Billion Dollar Revolution May Come From Healthcare



https://www./nigerias-healthcare-where-banking-2012-most-people-dolapo-r--jkpde

waice6571:
Revolutionising the substandard drugs that are being distributed all the place without consequences...... ?

Quality healthcare should be heavily subsidised and not unnecessarily monitised.

EBEk101:
Can be achievable if the US and other European countries stop draining Nigeria of it’s best brains

anonimi:
The often cited biography titled Madame Tinubu: Merchant and King-maker, authored by Nigerian historian Oladipo Yemitan, paints her views regarding slave trading.

On one occasion, during her final sojourn in Abeokuta, she was alleged to have sold a young boy into slavery and was accused of it. When arraigned before Ogundipe Alatise over the matter, she reportedly explained: 'I have a large house-hold and I must feed them well. I need money to do that, that's why'.

— Oladipo. Yemitan, 'Madame Tinubu: Merchant and King-maker'

Another section of Yemitan's Tinubu biography, referred to as the Amadie-Ojo Affair, captures a slave trading deal gone sour in 1853 (notably after the 1852 Treaty abolishing slavery in Lagos) wherein Tinubu tells another slave trader (Domingo Martinez) that "she would rather drown the slaves [20 in number] than sell them at a discount".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efunroye_Tinubu

Chienex24:
It will take long though. Revolution in healthcare is evident already in Nigeria but pathetically very slow due to lack of belief in modern healthcare by the average Nigerian citizen and neglect by the government

WantsandMore:
The next billion dollar industry is localized data centers in places like Lagos, Edo, Cross River, Akwa Ibom, places with access to water and energy. Powered by cheap gas turbines, solar or hydro thermal power. No one is looking towards this investment yet.

koladata:
The major problem is that we no dey too sick like those oyinbo with strange health issues. At my age , i've never ever been to hospital , not for once , all i do is agbo

JuanDeDios:
You're just lucky, my brother. People are facing health hell in Nigeria.

EmperorIsaac:
America's healthcare is not affordable becaise of capitalism. We should stop listening to these pundits!

JuanDeDios:
We should try communism or something?

koladata:
I know actually and I always thank God for the good health but still, our health issue is not as worse as those Oyinbo, an average Nigerian is very strong due to all the hardship we've probably gone through, those oyinbo have some strange name for some weird health condition that you've never even heard of

epainos:
I strongly doubt this will happen.

The only way this will happen is if the healthcare is taken out of the reach of the common man. Most common men in Igbos are in it and they become rich. How? Importation of fake drugs. This is what? Corruption. Just one side of it. More corruption there.

If the government can remove the corruption there, it will boom even without tech. I believe there is tech for the oil industry but here we are. Dangote who even stepped in is facing a lot. We arent still seeing the dividends.

But for the Fintech, the same few people who were corrupt in it are still the same leading it today. The Fintech just makes the system easy and even got the corrupt guys richer. But in oil, for the corrupt guys there, the price must be high and people must suffer. Same with health. People must continue dying and suffering or those bad people there are either killed or sent to jail. Let's face the fact.

If I was to advise any ai expert, just focus on Fintech. Leave the health system alone. Go and ask doctors how they are struggling yo treat their patients. How many can import drugs directly from a reliable source.

OK ooooo.