Pronov

Approximately 1.6 million Africans died of malaria, tuberculosis and HIV-related illnesses in 2015. These diseases can be prevented or treated with timely access to appropriate and affordable medicines, vaccines and other health services. But less than 2% of drugs consumed in Africa are produced on the continent, meaning that many sick patients do not have access to locally produced drugs and may not afford to buy the imported ones [https://bit.ly/2OZLcjY]. 

 
Pronov addresses the problems of lack of access to genuine & affordable medicines by low income and poor communities in Nigeria, inventory management inefficiencies and financial exclusion  of poor-urban population.
 
Pronov provides a holistic business solution for pharmacies in frontier markets - inventory management, supply chain, business intelligence/analytics & digital payment via smartphone. 
 
Through its bulk-breaking supply chain  model, Pronov facilitates the availability of genuine medicine to pharmacies at affordable prices through orders via its online platform.

According to a 2012 WHO report, 16.7% of medicines being circulated in the Nigerian pharmaceutical industry are fake; and the low-income and poor members of society are most susceptible to the consumption of these drugs. This menace becomes worse because the few genuine drugs in circulation are very much inaccessible for this demography of people.  

GIZ reports that expenditure on essential medicines by low-income/poor people in Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for about 20% of their family income. This underlines the “Poverty Premium” these people pay to access critical essential medicines. This means steady inflation in the prices of essential medicines due to last-mile distribution or value-chain inefficiencies will draw these people closer to extreme poverty. 

Unfortunately, Micro & Nano-dispensaries (regarded as PPMVs in Nigeria) which serves as the first health responders to the poor are excluded from economies of scale due to the small volume of their inventory orders and the multi-layered middle-men which inflates cost price of stock. Stock-outs regularly experienced by these stores also threatens access to essential medicines for the people they serve.

Pronov targets low income and poor communities dubbed “bottom of the pyramid”. These people, unfortunately, buy their drugs from Community Pharmacies (CPs) and Proprietary & Patent Medicine Vendors (PPMVs). CPs and PPMVs are the first source of care for between 8% and 55% of illnesses occurring among children under five.  Across Nigeria, PPMVs are the main source of medicine for common health conditions. An estimated 200,000 PPMVs operated in the country as of 2005. PPMVs and CPs serve about 75% of the 196 million Nigerian population.

Since the inception of Pronov, we have continually engaged critical stakeholders across the pharmaceutical value chain in Nigeria. These include Pharmaceutical Association of Nigeria (PSN), Association of Community Pharmacies of Nigeria (ACPN). 

We have regularly iterated on our solution based on feedback received from these organizations, stores who run on Pronov and customers that have been onboard loyalty program. We regularly organized focus group discussion as well as the Pronov Cooperatives (an association of community facing pharmacies driving financial inclusion). Pronov Cooperatives aggregates CPs & PPMVs in Nigeria in a contributory loan support system where each CP/PPMV can access loans in turns for procurement of large volumes of medicines on Pronov platform.

Pronov is a technology platform that improves the profitability of micro & nano-dispensaries by fusing smart inventory management and bulk breaking (AI-powered medicine supply chain) with financial services for the under-banked or unbanked people living in low-income/poor communities thereby ensuring better economic and health outcomes.

Pronov is a cloud-based digital payment hosted on Microsoft Azure server with a backend built on PHP Laravel framework with an incorporated MySQL and Reddit database. It deploys Metabase for its data analysis. Pronov is built on native android with its preferred language being Java and its persistent database is Realm database with communication between mobile and backend being Restful Web service. Pronov is deployed on Android mobile devices and can be downloaded on Google PlayStore.

Pronov currently provides the following core services;
i. Inventory Management for Bottom of Pyramid Retail Pharmacy Stores - Pronov notifies Community Pharmacies (CPs) or Proprietary Medicine Vendors (PPMVs) of low-stock and near expiration dates thereby eliminating frequent stock-outs of medicine. Other features are store accounting and remote sales alert.
ii. Supply Chain Management – Pronov facilitates availability, ease of access, and cost reduction on lifesaving drugs leveraging gathered market intelligence and unique cohort purchase and bulk breaking model. Pronov buys in bulk from manufacturers/importers of pharmaceutical products and facilitates the order and delivery wholesales stock to CPs & PPMVs via the app
iii. Business Intelligence Services – Pronov provides monthly business analytics to each of her premium customers with valuable insights that inform best decisions. 
iv. Financial Inclusion/digital payment - Pronov powers the collection of digital payments through USSD, mobile wallet and direct bank transfer while incentivizing digital payments with loyalty-reward programs for households to be financially included. 
v. Other Sundry Services – Provision of HMO services to further improve access to affordable healthcare by those at the bottom of the pyramid. We are also building Agency Banking models for Pronov stores which would help drive financial inclusion in rural localities in Nigeria.

ProNOV works by leveraging a lean mobile based inventory management system with integrated e-payment solutions to manage cohorts of micro-retailers that otherwise currently manage their day to day business with pen and paper. Upon this, they are first financially included by self-organized cooperatives, and encouraged to take advantage of a robust back-end just in supply chain system that aggregates demand, accredits supply and breaks bulk demand emanating from cohorts managed by the system.

Pronov is a cloud-based digital payment hosted on Microsoft Azure server with a backend built on PHP Laravel framework with an incorporated MySQL and Reddit database. It deploys Metabase for its data analysis. Pronov is built on native android with its preferred language being Java and its persistent database is Realm database with communication between mobile and backend being Restful Web service. Pronov is deployed on Android mobile devices and can be downloaded on Google PlayStore.

The current technology that ProNOV uses is scalable, having been developed in an agile manner and to be easily deployable in low bandwidth environments. The key component required for micro-dispensaries is a smartphone, which is now widely available in Nigeria and wider ECOWAS region. In addition to this, ProNOV has developed a desktop version of its technology which can now be used in the physical stores
subscribed to its system.

The components driving ProNOV's path to scale span across technology upgrade (servers, databases, engineering talent), data science outlay (intelligently captured essential points for credit-risk mitigation), partnerships with licensed Financial Service Providers (integrating bouquet of utility services unto the app for ease of cross-selling), among  others.

Leveraging desktop research and baseline surveys conducted by our team, it was determined that pharmacies are the first port of call for the poorest peoples oft the world, accounting for 80% of their healthcare spending.

Indeed, scientific based evidence exists that technical progress (especially in pharmaceutical access and availability) can lead to significant positive outcomes in infant mortality [2 Pharmaceuticals and the Developing
World, Michael Kremer, Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 16, Number 4—Fall 2002—Pages 67–90].
To this end, solving issues related to availability of essential medicines including lowering costs goes a long way to improve health outcomes.

ProNOV was originally tested with micro-retailers in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) sector between 2015 and 2016, as a lean mobile-based technology to help with Inventory management. This proof of concept
test was scaled into a full pilot  in 2017. After initial development and a 12 month deployment and further testing in Lagos that saw adoption by about 600 micro-dispensaries it went live across three additional cities (Abuja, Kaduna & Ibadan) with over 1,600 deployments at commercialization level.

We currently cover 3 states & the Federal Capital Territory (Lagos, Oyo, Kaduna & Abuja-FCT). Our solution is best suited for the rapidly urbanizing population of West Africa, where up to 50% of peoples live in cities. We currently have signed up to our platform  about 1600 micro & nano-dispensaries and we plan to  to 15,000 by 2023 out of over 200,000 medicine outlets in Nigeria and ECOWAS region.

In 5 years, we plan to grow our number of stores to about 100,000. This means we would be have well covered the 36 states in Nigeria and established presence in Ghana, Benin, Cameroon and Togo.

Over the next 5 years, we plan a gradual migration from the current offering  towards a consumer-facing application (Pronov Exclusive App - PEx) poised to connect the last-mile consumers/beneficiaries with their local Pronov micro & nano-dispensaries for fulfillment of medicine prescriptions and Financial Services.

The goal of Pronov Exclusive is to onboard the billions of low-income users whose first proper contact with technology is their feature phones and the Pronov inventory management app in the local drugstore. 

Pronov Loyalty feature is a major feature of the current Pronov Platform as the customer Management feature that helps Pronov Store Managers uniquely identify their customers, collect basic Know-Your-Customer (KYC) data and manage the relationship with their customers. This feature profiles unique customers and provides key information which enables Pronov to target and deliver critical last-mile services (through Pronov Exclusive App - PEx) that further guarantees access to essential medicines and financial inclusion to the poor and economically vulnerable in the society. 

The components driving Pronov’s path to scale span across technology upgrade (servers, databases, engineering talent), data-science outlay (intelligently captured essential points for credit-risk mitigation), partnerships with licensed Financial Service Providers (integrating bouquet of utility services unto the app for ease of cross-selling), etc.

We project to have onboard over 50,000 stores in 5 years and impact over 15 million direct beneficiaries.

Driving scale across five new countries would require us expanding the core team, improving infrastructure, rolling out a consumer facing product and strengthening distribution and supplier/vendor linkages. Layered financial services that drives further financial inclusion and deliver more profit to micro-dispensaries will also need to be on-boarded rather quickly as ProNOV seeks to expand. The above would hinge on available of funds to help drive the processes.

Identified as a barrier is also cultural block which would be as a result of people's resistance to digital technology adoption especially in poor communities

We plan to overcome the funding barrier by growing lean and spreading as we expand into these new territories. ProNOV currently realize revenue from subscription for its premium services ($50/annum), bulk breaking margins ($0.5 for every $10 order) and value added transaction fee (0.15%). In the future it will add subscription fee for business intelligence consulting leveraging the big data it generates. 

To overcome cultural barrier, we would leverage our Monitoring and Evaluation processes to drive community engagement through identified stakeholders through platforms such as focus group discussions, seminars and community driven approaches.

not applicable

Full time - 8

Part time - 15

Our team is composed of the finest Global Health experts, Pharmacists, Supply Chain Professionals, Software Engineers, Project Management Professionals, Data Analysts, Monitoring & Evaluation Experts, Public Health Consultants and Business Development Experts.

These professionals have garnered over 30 years combined experience deploying and facilitating impact projects across Africa with focus on Health, Energy and  Agriculture sectors

See below LinkedIn profile of Executive team:

Idris Ayodeji Bello - https://www.linkedin.com/in/belloidris/

Michael Oluwagbemi - https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-oluwagbemi-pe-pmp-mba-98539313/

Wole Odetayo - https://www.linkedin.com/in/oluwole-odetayo-69277a2a/

Marsha Wulff - https://www.linkedin.com/in/marshawulff/

• Funders

• • Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF)
• Pharma Community/Associations
  • Association of Community Pharmacists of Nigeria (ACPN)
  • Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria (PSN)
  • Nigerian Association of Patent And Proprietary Medicine Dealers (NAPMED)
• Logistics         
  • Federal Express Corporations (FedEx)
• Warehousing
  • Biofem Group Limited
•  Bankers
  • Fidelity Bank
• Payment Gateway
  • Flutterwave Inc
• Drug Manufacturers
  • Emzor Pharmaceutical Industries Limited
  • Greenlife Pharmaceuticals Limited
  • Vitabiotics Limited
  • Bond Chemical Industries Limited
  • Granduage Nigeria Limited
  • Rockforth Pharmaceuticals Limited
  • Glaxosmithkline Nigeria Plc
  • Biofem Pharmaceuticals Limited
  • Society for Family Health
  • World Wide Commercial Ventures Ltd

Our solution currently generates  revenue leveraging the under-listed revenue streams: 

Supply Chain - Bulk purchase of drugs directly from manufacturers and sold at a mark up price of about 5 - 8% 

Sale of Technology (ProNOV Premium) - Payment from subscription to digital technology. 

Service Fee - Revenue is generated for digital on-boarding of drug products by Field agents. 

Tool-kits - Revenue is generated from sale of digital toolkit (tablets, dongles, mobile printers) to pharmacy stores. 

Partnerships - Revenue will be generated from partnerships with financial institutions (banks etc) through Agent banking margins

Big Data Sales

To further scaling, ProNOV will sustain its city by city expansion with its strategic partner, by driving adoption and increasing supply chain throughput that delivers 90% of its margin that further sustains downstream investments. 

The scope of work planned next is to expand to 9 additional cities in Nigeria, to account for the most populated 13 cities in Nigeria that account for 50% of the population or 100 million people, of which 70 million are poor. 

To achieve this, expanding the core team, improving infrastructure, rolling out a consumer facing product and strengthening distribution and supplier/vendor linkages. Layered financial services that drives further financial inclusion and deliver more profit to micro-dispensaries will also need to be on-boarded rather quickly as ProNOV seeks to expand.

ProNOV currently realize revenue from subscription for its premium services ($50/annum), bulk breaking margin ($0.5 for every $10 order) and value added transaction fee (0.15%). In the future it will add subscription fee for
business intelligence consulting leveraging the big data it generates.

Pronov is applying to Solve to leverage its network of collaborators and partners to advance its course, help drive its scaling across Africa through facilitating partnership and funding support

Not applicable

Pfizer Pharmaceuticals and other established international pharmaceutical firms 

Business Accelerators

Tech Incubators

Impact Investors/ Angel Investors

Not applicable

Our solution addressed the Innovating Together for Healthy Cities Prizeas it enables equitable access to affordable and effective health services, especially through community health workers and clinics, for those most underserved.

The prize will be used to do the following;

i) Expanding our customer base from 300 to 2000 (expansion in Lagos and additional two states) for onboarding and supply chain
ii) Increasing our product range (Supply chain) from 11 to 50 drug products.
iii) Warehousing and logistics

iv) Development of technology (Pronov Ex and Pronov F)

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