Daniel Marfo’s Journey into leading Zipline Ghana: KNUST Graduate Stories
Daniel Marfo studied Pharmacy in KNUST and graduated in the year 2009. A couple of years after school, he started out on a journey solving problems in the Ghanaian healthcare space using technology. The experiences gained in solving the problems he encountered prepared him for what he currently does — leading Zipline’s medical drone delivery program in Ghana.
How Was Growing Up For You?
The first 10 years of my life were spent in Takoradi, where I attended Chapel Hill School — those were fun years. My family moved to Accra, where I attended St. Martin De Porres before moving to St. Augustine’s College for senior high school.
To be honest, I didn’t have a clear career path that I desired as a child. All I knew deep inside was that I wanted to do something memorable.
Here comes the tragic but fun fact — I broke my arm after secondary school. I was sent to the Korle-Bu Teaching hospital for treatment, but it was hard getting a doctor — they were on a strike. I had been nursing thoughts of becoming a doctor, so when I realised that the pharmacists hadn’t gone on strike, my teenage mind concluded pharmacists were better off than doctors, at least I hadn’t heard about them ever going on strike regarding their compensation.
Pharmacy it was, and KNUST was the university I opted for.
How Was Your Time In KNUST?
I would say KNUST was another fun season of my life — that’s the most part I remember.
Pharmacy students were generally known to always be serious and devoted to studying, but I went into the school with the mindset that just being academically inclined wasn’t enough. I focused on building networks that would traverse the boundaries of the university, having as much fun as possible in the process, not neglecting my studies. Those networks of contacts and the relationship-building experiences I gained have in many ways served as my foundation for life after school.
Did You Envision Yourself Working In Technology Even As A Pharmacy Student?
From the very onset — no. What I rather knew was I still wanted to do something unconventional. Hospital, Community and Industrial pharmacy were the 3 main options that were before me when I was rounding up my undergraduate studies in KNUST. I just knew all 3 didn’t provide the avenues for the impact I desired to make. I was always desiring something cutting edge.
I started reading a lot of books in my final year. I continued reading into my National Service year, reading as deeply as I could. I did a lot of research on new fields within healthcare and pharmacy.
In those explorations, I found something that was really attractive and interesting to me — regulatory pharmacy (ensuring that medicine that we see on the market comply with set standards). I found that cool, and it was then an emerging field of pharmacy in Ghana. That ended up being the path I initially chose. I rose through the ranks quickly because there weren’t many people to compete with, and it was still a relatively new field.
It was through that period that I got a lot of confidence to do so much more.
How Did You Start Out On An Entrepreneurial Journey?
Around 2013, I had a friend who ran a pharmacy and was in line to get an investment from a foreign investor to import medicine into Ghana. The investor was requesting for data to prove that the medicine could truly sell in the country. We tried all we could to get data sets to conduct a market research — we realised there was a huge lack. My friend lost the investment opportunity because we just couldn’t get it together — there was no organized data to prove a case.
We decided to build a data analysing system to help people get easy data e.g. top 5 antibiotics in Ghana. We wanted that data to be easily accessible and usable. My brother who was into technology came on board and we continued this journey.
The system expanded and became useful, even to people and institutions from around the globe. That inspired us to take on more challenges. We decided to build a health insurance system, then ventured into developing software for healthcare companies, then became grounded as a team providing data-driven technology solutions within Ghana’s healthcare space.
That simple data analysis project became a company called RX Health Info Systems. As we speak today, there are about 14 private insurance companies in Ghana and 13 of them use the health insurance system we built. We have been able to expand and provide our services in Nigeria, DRC, and some other African countries.
What I kept learning on the journey is that, once you are able to do something and you get it done well, you get a drive to want to do even more.
How Did You Get To Zipline?
We had been working on RX Health Info Systems for about 5 years. The recognition of our work continued to grow and someone from Zipline reached out to me. They had seen that I had a great combination of experiences in healthcare and technology. They mentioned they had a wonderful mission and they would like to find out if I was interested in listening to them.
I had conversations with representatives from Zipline. I began to think through it and realised that was the memorable and unconventional thing my 10-year-old self had been dreaming about.
The first time I saw the Zipline drones delivering medicine to people in rural areas, I knew that was it — what I had been searching for since I was a child, wanting to do something unconventional. The stories have been amazing so far, from people getting snake bites on remote islands now having their lives saved in time because of Zipline’s drone delivery of anti-venoms to badly injured individuals receiving blood packs in a matter of minutes — it is all amazing.
I find this mission worthy of my time.
How Can We Drive Healthcare Innovation In Africa?
The banking and finance sector adopts technology pretty quickly, even agriculture is moving up in it’s adoption rate, but healthcare is still steeped in processes that need time and testing.
Healthcare in Africa has in many ways become slow to adapt to technological innovation.
To drive innovation in healthcare, we need to look at the pain points. When you show the stakeholders in healthcare how data-driven technology can solve a problem that is a pain point, they start to open up to change.
For us, that has been one of the strategies we have adopted. It took 9 months of us listening to and gathering input from health insurance companies, health facilities and various stakeholders before we presented a solution that addressed their major concerns. That was when they decided to give our health insurance system a chance. We had to bring them from a place of pessimism to a place of optimism.
We have to do all the work needed to point out the pain points in the healthcare system to all stakeholders, then ask ourselves — What is the most African solution that works?
How Can Universities Engender Innovation And Entrepreneurship?
When I was in KNUST, we did a course that was called “Entrepreneurship”. It was one of my favourite courses. I don’t know if it still runs, but it really helped me — it was amazing.
If universities are serving as a place of learning, more courses around innovation and entrepreneurship should be taught regardless of a student’s program of study.
Making innovation and entrepreneurship staple courses in universities will change a lot. Even if students don’t become entrepreneurs, they could become intrapreneurs, innovating in the workplace.
The current knowledge transfer process is not challenging enough to let students bring out new ideas. There needs to be a thought-leadership approach to teaching. We should have more innovation labs in universities and more competitions around innovation — those should not be restricted to strictly engineering and technology students but broadened even to healthcare.
Final Words?
I think we all have the chance to make or cause a change. We can be the change that we desire to see. We often complain about the problems around us, but if we want to see change, let us be the change we want.
If you are unhappy about anything, change it. Whether it is something you are unhappy about at home or work, even down to how much you get paid, the power to change it largely rests on you.
Nominate Someone For Me To Interview.
Kofy Hagan. He runs Laine Services. They are the leading HR company in Ghana
