Tag: Inventions

You can’t find these things in Africa

General Medicine


We had a lecture on Monogenetics this afternoon and looked at some genetic conditions present in Uganda. Conditions like:

  • Thalassemia
  • Sickle cell anaemia
  • Haemophilia
  • Tay Sachs Disease
  • Huntington’s disease

The lecture was dragging a bit so I engaged the lecturer by asking some questions about how we could solve these problems forever.
And I asked what it would take to be able to do genetic screening on every newborn baby…as well as to do gene therapy on adults.

The question seemed to strike a nerve and the lecturer proceeded to detail how expensive the smallest possibility of doing this would be.

“Just one vial of primer for genotyping would cost $800…just to do part of the screening.”

And then after painting a doom and gloom picture, it culminated with the phrase:

“You can’t find these things in Africa.”

Henry Ford said: the person who thinks it can’t be done and the person who thinks it can are both right.

And all the breakthroughs in society are the result of a heretic daring to take someone’s ceiling as a floor for building the next discovery on.

I believe that many of the problems in Africa aren’t as impossible or hopeless as they’re made out to be.

The hopelessness narrative serves the purpose of generating sympathy (and donations) to fund the various NGOs on the ground.

But when you view them as simply problems to be solved, they’re no different from problems like:

  • Making cars easily affordable at great scale (Henry Ford)
  • Getting a heavier-than-air vehicle to fly without crashing (The Wright Brothers)
  • Inventing a bulletproof vest (Stephanie Kwolek)
  • Defining the theory of radioactivity (Marie Curie)
  • Equality between blacks and whites in the USA (Martin Luther King Jr)
  • Putting a computer on every desktop in the world (Bill Gates)
  • Organising all the world’s information (Larry Page and Sergey Brin)
  • Growing a baby outside of the body (Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards

Not to mention (in no order whatsoever): The Internet, overnight shipping, driverless cars, polio vaccine, seedless grapes, oral contraception, virtual reality glasses, the pancake…

All of these innovations – big and microcosmal – are simply successful attempts at developing problems to solutions.

And the problems in medicine aren’t the problems. But rather the Mindset that views them as “unsolvable”.

That’s one of the biggest issues I’ve found in my time dealing with medical schools over the last 18 years.

Students are trained to diagnose and manage rather than empowered and provoked to solve problems.

Management is an important part of solving the problem. But in practice, it becomes the end, rather than a means to support the end of completely solving the problem.

And when it comes to the so-called “that’s life in Africa” problems, this mindset of problem solving is a vital asset to cultivate.

So to make this practical…and not just a rant…my challenge is to outline some of the top high impact problems in healthcare…and see if I can articulate the solution that’s needed.

And if the solution is just “money”, then that’s another problem that is quite simple to solve.

Africa has the potential to be the healthiest, most prosperous and peaceful continent on the planet.

And an important step towards realising this potential is to ditch the “not in Africa” narrative when it comes to conceiving solutions.

All things are possible…especially in Africa.

Image: oecd.org