JOKKOSANTE

According to WHO, 100 million fall every year under the poverty line due to unexpected health expenses. In Africa, more than 50% of total expenses are paid out-of-pocket and 65% of individuals out-of-the-pocket payments are dedicated to medicines. Despite this incredible situation, big part of money aimed to Health is not efficiently used: Local vulnerable population are still facing high drugs related expenses without any efficient health coverage. 

Diaspora is sending money but there are not sure the money sent for health expenses won’t be misused. Health Programs, Private companies CSR activities), Foundations, NGOs don’t have any means to make sure that the final beneficiaries of their donations will receive the medecines for free.

In addition, international/national remittances fees and/or logistics costs are additional barriers that negatively impact the medecine final delivery cost to remote areas

JokkoSanté is a Health-focused digital payments platform. We give Health Campaigns funders and managers an unique tool to improve their impact with online transactions, third-party targeted payments, traceability, transparent billing, automated awareness text messages, etc.

Our solution JokkoSanté is a web/mobile app easy to use for all stakeholders: 

• NGOs, Private Companies and Health Programs use their online account to launch funding campaigns and target their beneficiaries by location, age, gender, interest (Malaria, HIV/AIDS, Albinism, Pregnant Women) etc... 

• Diaspora can buy points online with credit cards or Paypal and send those points to their family members or friends 

• People can micro-save by buying points in medical centers or pharmacies or with mobile money 

• Health Insurances and mutual companies can manage their members on the platform and pay pharmacies with points transfered to their members.

The solution is totally free for population and they only need a feature phone to register (or get registered) and use the platform (SMS and USSD based). This make sure there is no gender, disease or other barriers and all personal information are kept confidential JokkoSanté app is used by medical doctors in affiliated medical centers for entering prescriptions (digital prescriptions) for targeted vulnerable populations. The beneficiaries get their medicine in internal public pharmacies (Initiative de Bamako) or private pharmacies that have signed contracts with us and use our app as Sales and Billing system

Below are the side benefits of using points system on mobile phones 

• our platform can be used by the sponsors (Foundations, Health Programs, NGOs) to send Health Information by text messages to their target beneficiaries because when registering, members must accept to receive health related messages.

• The system is transparent as beneficiaries receive branded text messages telling them who has paid their prescription 

• By bringing crystal transparency on points donations (Foundations, NGOs and Private Sector) and on diaspora points transfers, we are improving access to good and reliable medicines while increasing official pharmacists revenues

• Last but not least, all real-time data processed can be used by Public Sector, Health Programs to measure their impact more accurately and then improve their approaches in a timely manner

JokkoSanté is a health-focused digital payments platform that enables connecting different health system players through a wallet on the mobile phone. The platform as it is designed performs financial transactions between three key players in the health ecosystem: the patient, the payer ( which can be the patient himself, but also a third party payer) and the provider of healthcare  (the pharmacy). 

The platform provides the following features for each of these players: 

• Patients can put money aside in their mobile wallet to save for medicines, or receive points from donors, employers, or remitters to pay for medicines. 

• Payers, such as donors, remitters, and employers, can directly put points in someone’s wallet, ensuring that their money ends up with the beneficiary (no leakages) and ensuring that it can only be spent on medicines purchases (no misuse).

• Pharmacies (standalone private pharmacies or public pharmacies in hospitals) can receive payments through healthcare wallets for medicines purchases: the direct transaction is between the patient and the pharmacy - both must approve for the transaction to happen. Pharmacists can also use the digital platform as a digital stock management tool and to gain insights in availability of medicines at neighboring pharmacies. 

In addition, Health Authorities can have access to realtime health statistics. Anonymized prescription data processing with Artificial Intelligence can pre-detect epidemics (our Epitrack project linked to JokkoSanté is currently on study phase)  

JokkoSanté Core Team with very experienced professionals familiar to health ecosystem : financing, care, technology, etc.

1. Adama Kane, Founder and CEO

- Social Innovator (Ashoka Fellow, Making More Health Fellow, USTTI Fellow(Virginia Health Systems)

- ICT specialist with international experience in telecommunication networks and applications.

2. Dr Gorgui Ndiaye

- Pharmacist with more than 15 years experience

- Drug regulations and law implementation

3. Dr Ndieme Diawara

- Pediatrician with more than 10 years experience

- Medical Centers procedures

4. Mrs Jinndaa KANE

- Communication officer

- Bilingual (French/English) communication and marketing specialist.

5. Mr Abdoulaye FALL

- Master in Healthcare Facility Management

- Expert in Patient Journey

6. Mr Samba Seye

- Finance Director

- Finance specialist in health project funding

JokkoSanté have gained 4,445 unique individual users. As families have an average of 10 members, the impacted lives are approximately 44,000. The application enables to register sub-users now within a family. It is connected to 27 pharmacies in total:

• 21 private pharmacies

• 4 pharmacies linked to health centers

• 2 pharmacies linked to hospitals

To date, it has processed 5,000 e-prescriptions and 100 health professionals have been trained to use the application.

 Geographically, these pharmacies are located mostly in Dakar and its sub-urban areas apart from the City of Passy (over 200 km from Dakar, near border of Gambia). The Hospital of Diamniadio (40 km from Dakar) has been for instance an important partner. 

Most mutuelles (mutual health insurance companies) would only have a typical average of 5 pharmacies eligible in Dakar for example. Therefore, with JokkoSanté having 26 pharmacies already registered in Dakar and its surrounding areas, this is a definite advantage from a coverage stand-point. 

It is to be noted that patients from Mali and Gambia also come to use the hospitals in Dakar. 

Some documentation on our impact : (https://drive.google.com/drive...)

We need more exposure and visibility about the work we have done so far.

We truly believe that JokkoSante can lives of millions people in Africa as it adresses the most essential pain in healthcare : access to good and reliable medecine 

The main benefit of a fully deployed JokkoSanté is to be on last mile and then be the first point of contact for the population. People often go to the pharmacy before going to medical center. 

Being selected by MIT SOLVE will open ways to connections and financial support for our scaling stategy.

We also need training and mentorship from international experts for our growth strategy

Wherever showcased, JokkoSanté is recognized as the first solution of its kind. This explains the numerous international awards received from serious institutions like ITU, UN, USAID, etc. 

We improve the traditional ways of funding healthcare. With limited sources of incomes, being able to receive points from other relatives or even organizations helps address the challenge related to affordability of medicines. The mechanism can also benefit organizations (such as NGO’s) donating medicines as a current model. Instead of shipping medicines and offering them to communities through local authorities, points can be directly offered as an alternative

We are in era of digitalization and JokkoSanté digitalize the traditional processes of delivering medicines to vulnerable people and targeted communities. By the way, the enforce collaboration between all stakeholders in a unique win-win model 

The main benefit of a fully deployed JokkoSanté is to be on last mile and then be the first point of contact for the population. People often go to the pharmacy before going to medical center. And many transactions (drug purchases) are not traced. JokkoSanté offers the opportunity to trace all those transactions with the patient profile : localization, age, gender, etc. 

All those data gathered and analyzed on real-time, with Artificial Intelligence) is a very powerful tool to detect and prevent epidemics and then raise alerts towards the local/national  authorities according to triggers parameters implemented. 

We impact targets 3.1, 3.2 and 3.8 by facilitating access to essentials medicines, especially for pregnant women and newborns. 

In a country where primary health spending per capita is no more than USD 35 per year (WHO, 2019) and out-of-pocket-expenditures as percentage of total expenditures is 52.4%, people struggle to access basic healthcare. Since essential medicines amount to 66% of families' health expenditures, it is important to focus on addressing these barriers first.  

The success KPIs will be :

• number of beneficiaries

• anonymous realtime data on diseases occurrence, health expenses per area, per gender, per age, etc. , number of beneficiairies per area, per gender, per age, etc.

• availability of essentials medicines especially in remote areas

• the deployment cost per user : less than 1 USD per user

• the  percentage of fund dedicated to final beneficiaries : more than 89 %
  

The software is developed to guarantee security and privacy. To access the software, medical doctors and pharmacists need prior authorization of the patient in order to be able to access their data. This authorization is secured by a one-time password valid for 1 minute, sent with encryption to the patient mobile phone by text message.

Donors do not have access to the full cellphone numbers of the beneficiaries, as it is truncated. When they send SMS broadcasts, they just indicate which funding campaign beneficiaries they need to reach, and the application extracts the appropriate target. 

For these reasons, JokkoSanté was the first Senegalese startup to be granted an authorization by the Personal Data Commission in 2016.

Data is owned by the users and they can access it, modify or delete it any time. It is their fundamental right.

The Internet in Africa is limited by a lower penetration rate when compared to the rest of the world providing last-mile Internet access to rural areas in Africa is a very challenging task therefore USSD is one of the solutions that seems to offer a sustainable business case. USSD is a real-time connection between a mobile network operator’s computer and a user’s mobile phone, allowing a two-way emission and reception of data on a mobile phone. Thus, internet connection is not necessary and USSD can be used on either a smart or a feature phone. This technology differs from text messages in that data is not stocked on mobile phone – it is only accessible while the USSD session is open. Concretely, users usually type a short number such as *406# and menu through which they can navigate by using their phone’s keys appears.

By using SMS and USSD, people in remote/deprived areas can use JokkoSante with their feature phones.

- 3 full-time 

- 3 part-time

- 2 mentors 

- 1 contractor

We wrote the initial idea on 2013. The core team worked on the concept till 2015 and a pilot project was launched in a remote village (Passy) with one B2B client (CSR activities)

From 2015 to 2020, the project extended to other cities (Dakar).

Since then, we are working to launched pilot projects in Mali and Ivory Coast and also to scale in Senegal. But our plans were hardly impacted by Covid-19 pandemics. 

Our team is composed of men and women from diverse culture and expertise.

Even from a french-speaking country, we are struggling to communicate in English language, so that our solution is knowed all over the world

The financial model is recognizing 5 different revenue streams:

1. Sponsored Prescriptions

2. Points Transfer

3. B2B Points Purchasing

4. Stock Management

5. Drugs Payment Fees

The assumptions around pricing and margins have been based upon experience and market findings. Please find some highlights around the assumptions on pricing and commissions earned: 

1. Sponsored prescriptions

Average price of a prescription: XOF 3,000 (USD 6) on which a commission of 10% commission is earned leads to a: USD 0.60 as assumed on in the model. The marginal cost of the service is borne exclusively by SMS (sending of secret codes, confirmation of transactions, etc.) maximum 12 SMS sent from registration to the delivery of the medicines at a rate of USD 0.02 per SMS, i.e. a total of USD 0.25.

2. Points transfer (Business-to-Customer (B2C) Diaspora) 

Assumption that an emigrant participating with JokkoSanté is sending USD 47.50 per emigrant per year. This is viewed as a low case assumption by the company. 2% commission on shipments (USD 0.95) shared equitably between JokkoSanté and the company carrying the payment system; leading to a gross margin of around 50%.  

3. B2B points purchasing 

With the CSR channel, B2B payments are made by check or bank transfer following a purchase order after many meetings and negotiations. JokkoSanté assumes an average of USD 2,000 per company with a 10% commission, leading to a USD 200 per transaction.

• SMS costs can be applied here because the beneficiaries follow the same process as Sponsored Prescriptions.

• Taking that 200 people will benefit from the USD 2,000, we will have an SMS cost of USD 50.

4. Stock management

• For stock management, customers will pay an annual flat fee. The model assumes USD 1,000 annual subscriptions

• There is no associated direct cost, it is exclusively software processing, which is included in the development costs. 

5. Drugs payment fees

• Pharmacies that use payment systems like credit cards and mobile money pay fees to banks and their financial service providers (Orange Money, E-Money, Wizall, etc.) with commissions that are around 3%.

• By being paid with JokkoSanté points, JokkoSanté takes a commission of 1.5%, which is much considerably lower than current means of payment.

• With an average amount of a prescription is USD 6 (see above), we have a commission of USD 0.09 per prescription.

This is most cost-effective than strategies currently used : it is well-known that NGOs expenses on Logistics to deliver medicine are very high and that international money transfers are still very expensive

The main benefit of a fully deployed JokkoSanté is to be on last mile and then be the first point of contact for the population. People often go to the pharmacy before going to medical center. And many transactions (drug purchases without prescription) are not traced. JokkoSanté offers the opportunity to trace all those transactions with the patient profile : localization, age, gender, etc. 

After several years of successful pilot project in Senegal with many lessons learned we plan to expand internationally soon and impact 50 million beneficiaries globally by 2030.

Our strategy is to communicate widely on our pilot project results and then partner with Health NGO and Foundations, Governement, CSR-oriented Private Sector companies and local private companies

Our next steps are :
- full expansion in Senegal in 2025
- expansion or replication in West Africa in 2027
- expansion or replication in East Africa (Rwanda, Kenya) and globally before 2030

Technical Feasability : it is easy to replicate because our app is compatible with mobile feature phones, smartphones and laptop web browsers and mobile penetration rate is very high even in underserved areas

Communications/Advocacy : in Senegal, we partnered with public hospitals and medical centers to inform the population about our initiative (thanks to Badienou Gokh = community health promoters). In other countries, we will rely on equivalent mechanisms to reach all vulnerable populations

Financial Sustainability : JokkoSanté is a social entreprise recognized by ASHOKA and many social impact organizations meaning we have a validated business plan that generates impact. The business plan is also financially sustainable as. All we need is impact or VC funding to launch the project at a big scale.