Madiro
Madiro works to improve outcomes for vulnerable populations who lack access to quality healthcare due to weak health systems, because they live in rural, remote or peri-urban areas, or because they are impacted by conflict, climate or marginalization.
Vision: A world where a productive life is accessible to all.
Mission: Eliminate poor health as a barrier to people building better lives for themselves, their families and their communities.
Approach: Innovation has the potential to save lives and to help people lead healthier, more fulfilling lives. Madiro is focused on unlocking this potential by supporting transformative innovation in global health and humanitarian service to reach widespread adoption. Madiro drives impact via investment and grants, R&D, technical assistance and capacity building, direct implementation, M&E and implementation research. To achieve its goals, Madiro collaborates with technology, implementing, research and scale partners.
Voting member: James Fraser
Member since 2023
Meet a member: Madiro
What impact has your recent work led to that you are most proud of?
The first investment we made was in Healthy Entrepreneurs, a social enterprise rapidly scaling technology-enabled community health entrepreneurs (CHEs) to provide basic healthcare and health products to households in remote areas in Africa. In addition to leading a successful funding round where Madiro’s capital was leveraged 10:1, Madiro provides critical monitoring and evaluation and evidence generation support that has informed their scaling from 3,000 CHEs when we invested, to currently over 20,000 in the last two years. We are proud of supporting this scaling success as it translates into jobs for women who make up the majority of CHE workforce operating in 7 countries (Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, Burundi, DRC and Nigeria). Their goal is to scale to 150,000 CHEs in 10 countries by 2030.
What challenges and barriers are you working on addressing?
Madiro is focused on overcoming intractable challenges in global health and humanitarian service to eliminate poor health as a barrier to people building better lives for themselves, their families, and their communities. Our approach is to support social enterprises and transformative innovation attain widespread adoption. We invest at the Seed to Series A round stages, which has the moniker “the missing middle”, and fill the gap between the significant pre-seed funds that are available, and the lower risk later stage growth-funds. In addition, through technical assistance and capacity building, we support our investees overcome medium to long-term barriers to scale such as the lack of evidence required to satisfy health system gate keepers, technology-related issues, or how to scale in complex markets.
What is your call to action for our membership?
CAFIID members can help us in a couple of ways:
We are raising philanthropic capital to grow our capital pool aggressively over the next 18 months and any advice and doors that can be opened in that regard would be appreciated.
We appeal to any members who have visibility on the health ecosystem in Africa to reach out to us on pipeline and partnerships.!
What are you looking forward to in the coming months?
After launching Madiro’s African operations in May, we are looking forward to growing our presence in and shaping the continent’s health tech investment ecosystem while continuing to support impactful high-growth social enterprises. Madiro’s new offices are based in Kigali, Rwanda.
Updated May 2024