Waspito started with a loss. In the dim twilight of Kumba Town, an elderly man, Pa Lobe, clutched his chest as pain tore through him, his breathing shallow and laboured. His family rushed to help, embarking on a desperate journey to a distant hospital in Douala where there is a cardiologist, every passing minute heavy with uncertainty. The doctors existed. The treatment existed. But distance, delay, and fragile systems stood between life and care. Before they could get to Douala, it was too late. Pa Lobe died on the road.
That moment would change everything. For his son, Jean Lobe Lobe, his father’s death was not just a personal tragedy, it was a brutal exposure of a system where survival is often decided by proximity rather than possibility. Out of that loss, Waspito was born: a healthcare platform designed for African realities, enabling patients to consult doctors remotely, bringing care closer through digital access and mobile clinics, and treating time, connectivity, and access as matters of life and death, not convenience.
Waspito was born from this reality. Not as a Silicon Valley export, but as an African response to African constraints. It was built around a simple but often ignored truth: in much of the continent, healthcare access fails not because doctors do not exist, but because of inefficient systems. Today, Waspito is one of the clearest signals that African-led health innovation is no longer speculative. It is operational, scaling, and delivering care at national level. And the numbers matter.
Operating across Cameroon and Côte d’Ivoire, with expansion underway into other African countries, Waspito has built a digital health ecosystem that connects more than 1,500 partner doctors, both generalists and specialists, and over 200 partner laboratories and pharmacies. It provides 24/7 teleconsultations, mobile laboratory and pharmacy services, hospitalization coordination, and employer-based health management packages. It has achieved wide national coverage, including rural areas, and has raised $5.5 million to date to support its growth. This is not a pilot. It is infrastructure.
Innovation built for context, not convenience
Global health has long struggled with a design problem. Too many solutions are created far from the environments they are meant to serve, assuming stable electricity, short travel distances, dense hospital networks, and predictable patient pathways.
Waspito works because it starts from the opposite direction. It assumes long distances, delayed lab results, specialist shortages, misinformation, and urgency. It assumes that people will often seek advice before they can reach a hospital, that mobility is uneven, and that mobile phones are already the most reliable health interface many households have.
Rather than forcing communities to adapt to rigid systems, Waspito adapts systems to lived reality. Teleconsultations reduce unnecessary travel. Mobile labs and pharmacies bring services closer to patients. Doctor-supervised digital health spaces counter misinformation and dangerous self-medication, which remains a silent driver of preventable deaths across the continent.
This is not innovation despite infrastructure constraints. It is innovation because of them. Leapfrogging is not catching up. Africa’s development path is often described using the language of deficit. Behind. Lagging. Catching up. Health technology tells a different story.
Just as mobile money reshaped financial systems without relying on traditional banking infrastructure, digital health platforms like Waspito are leapfrogging physical bottlenecks. They do not wait for perfect roads, fully staffed hospitals, or dense specialist networks before improving access. They build connective tissue.
Waspito does not attempt to replace hospitals or clinicians. It integrates them. It digitizes access to services that already exist but are fragmented, distant, or poorly coordinated. In doing so, it shortens response times, reduces system friction, and preserves one of the most precious resources in healthcare: time.
This is not imitation of Western health systems. It is adaptation at speed. The funding gap is not about quality. Despite its scale and recognition, Waspito’s story also exposes a persistent global blind spot. African health innovations are still forced to prove themselves under conditions that comparable startups elsewhere are rarely subjected to.
Waspito has been voted Best Telemedicine Platform in Africa in both 2023 and 2024, and has received multiple national and international awards. Yet African health tech as a whole remains underfunded relative to its potential impact.
This is not because African innovators lack ideas, talent, or execution capacity. It is because global capital often remains cautious where it should be curious, and skeptical where it should be strategic. The result is a familiar paradox: African founders are expected to demonstrate scale before investment, while global startups are funded in anticipation of it.
Beyond apps, health systems still matter. Innovation alone cannot shoulder decades of underinvestment. Digital platforms can bridge gaps, but they cannot replace reliable electricity, stable connectivity, or functional referral systems. Waspito’s growth highlights both what is possible and what remains unfinished.
Governments have a role that goes beyond regulation. Strategic public investment in digital health policy, broadband access, and public-private partnerships would allow platforms like Waspito to function not as workarounds, but as integral components of national health systems.
Decolonizing healthcare is not about rejecting technology or external partnership. It is about ensuring that African-led solutions are trusted, funded, and embedded at scale.
A signal, not an exception. Waspito should not be treated as an outlier. It is a signal of where African healthcare is already heading.
Across the continent, innovators are building diagnostic tools, telemedicine platforms, community health networks, and data-driven systems rooted in local realities and global standards. What holds many of them back is not vision, but oxygen: sustained financing, policy alignment, and long-term institutional trust.
Reframing the global health lens. Waspito forces a necessary reframing of how global health understands Africa. Not as a testing ground. Not as a recipient. But as a design space where necessity sharpens innovation. Africa does not need permission to innovate. It needs partnership that recognizes competence, investment that recognizes scale, and a global health community willing to listen as much as it advises.
