Temie Giwa-Tubosun is a Nigerian-American health manager, founder of LifeBank (formerly One Percent Project), a business enterprise in Nigeria working to improve access to blood transfusions in the country.
Temie attended Osseo Senior High School, Minnesota, and graduated in 2003. She then attended the Minnesota State University Moorhead and graduated in 2007. In 2008, she went to graduate school at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey from where she graduated in July 2010.
In January 2010, she went for a graduate fellowship at the World Health Organisation in Geneva, Switzerland, which lasted till July of that year when she graduated Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. She worked briefly at Fairview Health Services in Minnesota in 2010.
In August 2011, she began a fellowship with the Global Health Corps, and spent the next year at Mbarara, Uganda, working with the Millennium Villages Project a project of the United Nations Development Programme and Millennium Promise.
On May 21, 2012, Temie founded a non-governmental organisation called “One Percent Blood Donation Enlightenment Foundation” (or One Percent Project) with the aim of ending blood shortage, educating people on the importance of blood donation for anyone in need of blood, to overcome fears, prejudice, myths and apathy of people on blood donation, and to increase an efficient distribution network of blood in blood banks in Nigeria.
In January 2016, Temie founded LifeBank, a business organisation set up to tackle the problem of blood shortage in Nigeria. The founding was inspired by the birth of her first child and the complications from that experience. The technology and logistics company is based in Lagos, and incubated at Co-Creation Hub in Yaba. As at January 2017, the company has helped deliver over 2000 pints of blood to patients across the state.
Temie got a spot as one of the winners of the $250,000 Africa Netpreneur Award. She was also awarded the Jack Ma African Business Hero award and also named the 2020 Laureate for Sub-Saharan Africa at the Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards among others.
Childhood memories and influence till date
I grew up in Nigeria. I was born in Southwest Nigeria. My parents were Professors and my dad taught at a school in Ile Ife. We lived in Ile Ife, but I was born in a place called Ila Orangun, it’s not a well-known town, it’s very small and a lot of people don’t know it. My dad was teaching at the college of education then. I was born in this town, but I grew up in Ile Ife in Osun State.
So, we’re always in the college education environment. My mum also taught high school English and French. Basically, I just grew up as the fourth daughter of an amazing couple. I’m fourth out of six, we had quite a big family. It was really interesting. We read a lot. When I was about eight, my parents moved to the US, and I joined them a couple of years later. So, I finished my education, my growing up, teenage years in Minnesota.
I am a Lagos person, I grew up in a small sleepy university town in Southwest Nigeria…I think it was a lovely childhood and it was a childhood that was very simple and I think that has always kept me till where I am today. I think my happiest is when I’m at home with a good book, my family is around me, and I’m just simple. I think that simplicity with how I grew up is what drives me now. No matter how many accolades people give me, I never feel cool with myself because I just have that background of living simply, having simple pleasures, and just being close to family.
When did you come back to Nigeria?
I came back after living in the US for nine years. I came back for just a summer break and I went to work in Northern Nigeria. It was really fun. I got a gig to work for the summer in Abuja, and I got to Abuja, my company at the time said, “we’re going to send you to Kano”. I just loved it. I went to the market, got all these cute outfits. I didn’t even know that there was danger, I think that helped. At the time it was the beginning of Boko Haram and it had not become what it is now. I felt very safe. I remember I used to work between Kano, Jigawa, and Kaduna, I go down those three roads often in a week. I worked in healthcare, I was doing some research for this organisation and it was really fun.
Then I left, went back home, lived in Europe for a little bit, went to East Africa, lived in the US, and then finally moved back at the time with my fiancée in 2012.
When and why did you decide to set up Life Bank?
Since 2009 I have this singular passion for maternal healthcare. That’s my thing. Every day when I wake up, what keeps me going and excited about the work that I do is maternal healthcare. How do we get to save mothers? Although Life Bank that I run is not only saving mothers, it’s saving children with pneumonia, we did so much work around COVID-19. We do so much more now. But for me, what I care about is maternal health. It came from an incident that happened to me while I was in northern Nigeria. There was a young lady that our team saw when we went to a village. She had been in labour for a couple of days and she just needed a C-section and they couldn’t afford it. They couldn’t get her to a hospital in the big city and they were just waiting for her to die because clearly, she wasn’t going to survive this childbirth.
I remember feeling this is my life’s work. If I can do work that could rescue people like this woman, then I’ll know that I’ve progressed. And that’s what I did.
What has changed?
What I do every day has changed. In the beginning I did everything, called hospitals, I’ll go and do the selling, I’ll do all of these things and it was more like operationally-focused worked and I really loved it because that was what I wanted to do.
But now, my day job is much different. I talk to investors, speak to the UN, talk to government agencies. The work that I do now is a lot more like systems building and a lot less client-focused which is a bit difficult. I have to go out of my way to remember why I do what I do because I don’t get to see those stories anymore because it’s more like building a big business now.
What I’m doing is like hiring leaders, talking to leaders, making the vision clear for the company, doing finance, raising money, talking to investors, talking to funders.
What personal experience also influenced starting LifeBank?
After having this passion for maternal healthcare, while I very young. I was 23 years old at the time; I was just beginning my life. I had this passion for maternal healthcare and I wasn’t a mum. It was just like an intellectual passion. Then a couple of years later, when I moved back to Nigeria, I was living here with my fiancée; we had gotten married and had a great life. I was working for the Lagos State government at the time, I had an NGO on the side that I was working on, and it was very simple. Then I got pregnant and went back home to the US to deliver my son, and it was really a difficult birth. I had a lot of complications. I had to have an emergency C-section. That woman that I met earlier, the problem that I ended up having was the exact problem she had. But within 20 hours, I was in the best hospital in the state, had over five doctors working on me; I had access to everything that I could need.
For me, what inspired me was the gap between what I lived through as a privileged young person and what she lived through as somebody who was poor, who lived in this region of the country where there is not a lot of resources. So, I decided that I was going to do something, take action, and start something to help rescue women in childbirth.
Did your personal experience help fuel your desire to make things work?
I don’t think it’s desire, but it forces me to keep working no matter how had things get. It’s hard. Because I’ve lived through it, I know what it means to be on that bed not knowing whether you’re going to survive, not knowing whether you’re going to hold your child, kiss your child, I have been in that space. So, there is a reason.
Anytime I get tired, want to give up, want to stop, I think back to those moments and put myself in the shoes of all these women who actually bleed to death every single day, who die before they get to see their children and I get re-inspired to continue building, moving, and pushing because ‘Nigeria will happen’ and you’re just like, ‘why am I here again?’ So, for me, what keeps me here, what keeps me doing the work is because I can put myself in the shoes of those women who are seconds/minutes from dying, from not getting to meet their children, and I think, for me, it’s an injustice and it keeps going, keeps me grounded, keeps me doing the work, keeps me building. It is what I’m all about.
How do you convince people to donate blood?
I think that, even though we’re not the most trusting environment, I think it’s actually quite easy to convince Nigerians to give blood. It’s not a very difficult thing, because Nigerians are incredibly giving. I don’t know why and I can’t explain it. There was a time when we had some riders, usually we set people to talk to middle-class people because we thought they are the ones who will understand, but somebody just said, “that’s a park” and there were lots of Okada riders there, I remember all my team members saying we’re not going there, they are not going to do it. But I said I would go and talk to them and thankfully I speak Yoruba. I spoke Yoruba to them, came down to their level, explained it and you would be surprises to know that over 50 of them just drove down and gave blood and left. And these were people who are struggling.
People always ask me why I am so hopeful about Nigeria. For me, it’s the Nigerian people, stories like that and I have so many stories where you convince people who you think wouldn’t be convinced and you just take a chance, tell them the story, and if you’re sincere, they would come and give, young people, students in university, older people, people who are religious, people who are not religious. So many people always come and show up for us and give blood and I think it’s one of those magical things that people don’t talk about under the radar in Nigeria.
If you have 200 people and you try to convince 200 people, maybe a couple will show up. I’m always just surprised when they show up and that makes me really hopeful. But those problems are there. Those problems where people don’t trust some hospitals, there are problems where women will rather give birth at home; there is a lot myths and belief in fake pastors. Those problems are there, but I have to be hopeful, I can’t do this work without having hope and being inspired. So, I’m always looking for inspiration.
And to be honest, for blood, we don’t need all of Nigerians to give blood before we can have enough blood, we only need one percent of Nigerians to commit to giving blood, every single quarter and we’ll have enough blood. I’m always focused on the one percent and figuring out where those one percent people are.
What is the process for donation like?
LifeBank as a business, we don’t make money and do anything around blood. What we are, if you think about it, we are like Konga marketplace, or Jumia marketplace, for blood and oxygen and tests…and so on. That’s who we are.
Our blood donor work is more like our CSR, how we give back to society. So, when we have a donation, a lot of people ask me, ‘why is my blood sold?’ because, at the end of the day, the patient has to pay when they get blood, even if it’s donated for free, the patient still has to pay. So, people are like, “you guys are selling my blood”.
It’s not like that. Blood itself is not sold. When you are a blood donor and you come and want to give blood, we have to run tests on you. We have to find out you’re fine. We have to find out if you can give blood, we have to check your blood pressure, and do a mini check up on you to make sure that you’re physically fit and fine and without that checkup, we’re not able to take your blood and that costs money.
To answer your question, what matters is that you’re an adult, the second most important thing is that you have to be well. You can’t be on your period, you can’t have any illnesses, you have to be healthy and an adult, and then you can give blood.
What role did you play during the COVID-19 period?
COVID-19 was one of those events you don’t hope happens again. It was a scary time. We knew since the beginning that it was important to have to use our skills that we had had before COVID-19 hit to help the country respond to it. The first thing we did was to build a testing centre. We partnered with some government agencies, to build a testing centre. Before then, we knew nothing about building a testing centre, but we knew how to do uncommon things, we knew how to do things quickly, do it well because we’ve been distributing critical resources round the clock in multiple states in Nigeria. So, we used that experience to push and to make sure that we figured out how to distribute test kits. First, it was building centres, then we went into distributing test kits and picking up tests and driving it to the labs.
We then went deeply into medical oxygen, delivering medical oxygen round the clock, seven days a week, and really driving growth within that life cycle. We did some work around medical equipment, we saved thousands of lives, we conducted about 30,000 tests. When you look at how many people the Nigerian government tested and you compare Life Bank’s number, it’s really high and we are glad to have participated extensively. I’m incredibly proud because we partnered with amazing organisations.
Do you receive support from government?
In terms of the government, thankfully they don’t stand in our way which is good. We have a very great relationship with our regulators both in Abuja, in all the cities where we operate, and in Lagos as well. I think we’re very lucky because our regulators don’t hurt us, they don’t stand in our way, and they are not trying to stop us. That is something I have been very glad about. In terms of support, not so much. One of the things that deeply disturbs me about our business is that we operate largely, about 90 percent of our orders go to private hospitals, and it’s really difficult to partner with government agencies or hospitals because of so much bureaucracy and not so much clear and clean way of operating.
We have stayed away from that because we have our own brand and we have our own culture and we don’t want to mess that up, so, we end up with the private hospitals. In terms of support, I think for me, partnering with Act Foundation was incredible. How do we partner with them? Every single day, we get calls from people who need the product and they cannot afford it. Not only can they not afford our fees, they can’t afford the blood itself, or the oxygen, or the tests…anything, they can’t afford it, and they need to buy it.
We had a case in Bayelsa where somebody desperately needed blood, she was white. Her PCV level was all the way low, they had been struggling with it but they didn’t have the money to pay for the blood. Thankfully, the doctor called and we got blood and drove it down there under bad security and people attacking our riders, and we gave her five bags of blood and now she’s fine and all of that is made possible by Act Foundation’s generous donation because we don’t have the resources to do these things.
We’re still a small business in terms of revenue because how do you charge people a lot of money when they desperately need what you’re charging? You have to charge well. Sometimes, there are some people who can’t even afford the low fee that we have.
So, we’re very grateful to our partners who allow us to do this work for the most vulnerable members of our society.
Awards
Netpreneur was really amazing. I think it was the one I felt like I worked hard for and I got it. Sometimes, when people see you, I don’t present as somebody who is super confident and super amazing. I’m actually very quiet and calm in my space. I like sitting in my corner, do my own thing. It was a competition, there were about 12 of us competing for the prize and I don’t think anybody would have said “she’s going to win” because I’m always in my corner.
But I practiced my pitch and thankfully I hit it and I won. The money was good, but for me, the biggest thing was the validation on that stage. It was really amazing.
Also, The Cartier award was amazing. I changed my phone recently so I was looking through my old phone’s pictures and saw that in 2016, I had screengrabbed a tweet that Bilikis Abiola had tweeted about the award. I had just started LifeBank at the time. So, it wasn’t even one year old then, so I couldn’t apply for it.
I screen grabbed that tweet and I began waiting. It was really gratifying to now win four years after I applied for this award. It was incredible.
Cartier was about what I could learn. I learnt from the judges, from the audience, from the program and I’m still learning. That award allowed us to launch in Kenya and start growing in that market. It’s been incredibly gratifying to have all this support from these organisations.
Daring to dream
One of the things I know is that your dream needs to make you nervous. It needs to make you have some level of anxiety. For me, if Amazon can be a large business in multiple continents, if Google and Facebook can do it, why not me? My dad inspires us with his vision for us and my mother basically teaching us how to reach this vision by working really hard. So, for me, I think that if I’m passionate and lean into my purpose, if I work really hard, then why not? Building a big business is hard but it’s not undoable and if other people can do it, so can I.
Zuckerberg’s commendation
He said he believes in the power of the internet because it has the power to do good. He said if everybody can have access to the internet, then everybody can build something great and he thinks that LifeBank is great and if pulled off efficiently, I would have shown a model that everybody in the world needs to emulate.
What that did for me? It actually scared me. I remember after that event, usually, whenever there is a big push, I usually run away for two days. For me, I don’t do it for commendation, it’s good when it happens, but it makes me anxious, and it makes me feel like all eyes are on me which is not always good for someone who has my personality. I’m incredibly introverted.
It was a validation and it showed that there is something there. When we started, we were very small and young. So, having somebody with his experience, expertise look at us and say “I see something in this business” was a validation. Of course, it got us a lot of attention, people who didn’t use to pick my calls started picking it up. The event where he was speaking about Life Bank, I wasn’t there because I couldn’t get an invite. I was so small in the sector that I couldn’t get an invite to that event, but he got on the stage and talked about me.
Those are the moments you know something magical just happened. He didn’t say ‘I think she’s going to pull it off’. He said ‘if she pulled it off.’ So, it was also a challenge to me, “Are you going to pull it off? Are you going to do it?” And I had to tell myself, ‘You know what? I’m going to show him and I’m going to do it. Glad I am living in that reality today”
Final words
If you’re a young woman, you have an idea, you’re shy and introverted, no one expects you to do great things, but you have something in you saying that you can. Listen to that voice, even if your voice is shaking and you’re worried, listen to that voice, stand up and just do it. Don’t wait for anybody to give you permission; just start. If that voice is telling you this is an idea and you feel passionate about it, start because that’s when magic happens. It is when you start, everything comes together, God sees your heart, grace will be added as long as you’re willing to do the work.
