Rest Essence did not expect to nearly lose a family friend during childbirth. At approximately 1 a.m., she went into labour and was shuttled between hospitals. The first facility declined to admit her for reasons that remain unclear, while the second lacked electricity. At a third hospital, under the glow of handheld flashlights, she delivered her second child via caesarean section. She then began haemorrhaging, and for a brief moment, Essence feared she would not survive.

She did survive, but the experience altered the trajectory of his own life. At the time, Essence had committed himself to spending a year searching for a problem in Africa worth solving. That harrowing night gave his search a clear direction, he told TechCabal.

“That experience opened my eyes to how big of a problem medical emergencies are in Nigeria and across Africa,” he said. “That was when it dawned on me that this is a problem worth solving. I had known how 911 operated outside of the country, but I kept questioning why it wasn’t functional in Nigeria.”

Nigeria does not have a single, universally operational national emergency number comparable to 911 in the United States or 999 in the United Kingdom. While the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) and some state-level services exist, pre-hospital emergency care remains fragmented and largely unavailable to most citizens, particularly outside major cities. Nigeria also records one of the highest maternal mortality ratios in the world, according to World Health Organization data, meaning the ordeal Essence witnessed is far from isolated.

Around the same period, Essence joined the Fishbowl Challenge, a competition in which participants form teams to address real-world problems. There he met Dr Muyiwa Oluwatobi, Dr Glennise Ayuk, and Abakar Mahamat, who all joined the initiative through the challenge.

The four founders recognized that instead of solving just one fragment of the emergency care puzzle, they wanted to build the underlying infrastructure that could get people help faster when every second counted. Together, they created Medwaka, an emergency response platform that connects patients experiencing medical emergencies with nearby hospitals, ambulances, and trained first responders via a mobile app.

Day 1: Rebuilding what already existed

Prior to the Fishbowl Challenge, Dr Oluwatobi had already launched an early pilot model in Ondo State, south-western Nigeria. That initial platform centred on blood donation and emergency support for expectant mothers, connecting pregnant women with blood donors during medical crises.

When Essence and the other co-founders joined the project through the Fishbowl Challenge, they identified a broader opportunity. The core issue, Essence believed, was that people did not know where to turn during emergencies, and no coordinated system existed to move a patient from the point of distress to appropriate care.

“The problem we were solving initially wasn’t large-scale enough,” he told TechCabal. “We realised the actual problem we needed to solve was much bigger.”

The team returned to the drawing board, consulting healthcare professionals, ambulance providers, and emergency responders to understand the mechanics of emergency care delivery.

The outcome was a reimagined Medwaka, transforming the blood donation platform into a full emergency response network. Through a mobile app, individuals experiencing medical emergencies could be connected to nearby hospitals and ambulances. With this vision established, the team built the first prototype and officially launched Medwaka in 2024. By February of that year, the rebuilt platform was ready for its inaugural pilot in Ondo State.

Day 500: When reality set in

When Medwaka launched its Ondo State pilot, it had a straightforward plan: train first responders, establish hospital partnerships, and provide people with a number to call during emergencies. However, the team encountered unanticipated challenges, including low public awareness of emergency response services, the difficulty of constructing a reliable first responder network, and the absence of ambulance infrastructure.

The shortage of functional ambulance services is a well-documented gap across many Sub-Saharan African health systems, where pre-hospital care is often limited by underfunding, weak infrastructure, and in some cases, an absence of formal emergency medical technician training pipelines.

The team began by training healthcare workers and local volunteers as first responders in Ondo State while onboarding both public and private hospitals to the platform, Essence said. They recruited individuals with motorbikes who possessed strong knowledge of their neighbourhoods, enabling them to reach a patient before an ambulance could arrive.

The objective was that if an emergency occurred, Medwaka would already have someone nearby capable of responding before the patient reached the hospital. By the end of 2024, Medwaka had trained 10 first responders and brought 5 hospitals onto the platform. A more significant obstacle, however, lay ahead.

The founders had envisioned Medwaka as a 911-style emergency response system, Essence noted, but they realised this ambition depended on infrastructure they did not control. Purchasing ambulances was financially beyond the reach of an early-stage startup, and relying on hospitals’ existing fleets meant contending with delays and inconsistent availability.

“It was either you bought your own ambulance, or you partner with hospitals that currently have ambulances,” he said. “We had a lot of challenges navigating that model.”

Day 1000: Rethinking emergency response

Confronted with the ambulance problem, Essence and his co-founders made a decision that would fundamentally reshape Medwaka’s strategy. They chose to abandon the attempt to operate an independent 911-style system without the ambulance fleet to support it, pivoting instead toward a partnership-driven model.

“Instead of trying to run this 911 system when we knew we couldn’t get ambulances, we decided to just continue with partnerships,” Essence said. “That was the biggest thing we did.”

From that point forward, the company began shifting its partnership focus away from public health institutions and toward private hospitals, health maintenance organisations (HMOs), governments, emergency agencies, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and community organisations, including the University of Medical Sciences, Ondo.

According to Essence, the partnership model transformed how Medwaka generated impact, enabling it to concentrate on strengthening existing emergency response systems.

The company also broadened its service offerings to include emergency response technology, first responder capacity building, digital emergency coordination tools, and healthcare system integration, he said.

Today, Medwaka reports that it has grown into a team of 20, trained 11 first responders, and facilitated more than 550 emergency requests through its platform and partner network.

Medwaka’s pivot places it among a growing cohort of African healthtech ventures attempting to fill gaps that public health systems have not yet closed, from telemedicine and healthcare financing to last-mile medical logistics. Whether partnership-driven models like Medwaka’s can scale beyond individual states will depend on sustained collaboration with the institutions that already control the infrastructure emergency response depends on.

For Essence, the company’s core ambition remains unchanged from the night he watched a family friend fight for her life: to build an integrated emergency response ecosystem that connects patients, healthcare providers, first responders, and public health institutions through technology.