The African Diaspora Marketplace contest recently awarded $50,000 to $100,000 to 14 immigrants to the United States from African countries to help them start or expand businesses in Africa. Some of them share how they plan to use the money on the New Enterprise blog.

Kojo B. Taylor

As my background is in franchising, I thought of leveraging my related knowledge to improve the public health system in Ghana. In the country the greatest need for basic health care services is in urban fringes and rural areas where such services are either scarce or unaffordable. Yet, there are nurses and medical assistants who potentially could provide accessible care in those areas. Three years ago, I started a company – MicroClinic International – that creates conditions for nurses to own and operate their own clinics. We assembled a team with the aim to create a network of community micro-clinics and recruit medical personnel to run them as franchisees.

A model micro-clinic is almost ready.

The clinics are 1,100-square-feet buildings with small labs and living quarters for franchisees. We provide business training, oversight, accounting services, a management information system and manage the brand. We also provide quality control and sources for supplies including the drugs that meet intellectual property protection criteria.

But what might be most important for many is our help in getting loans for franchisees from venture funds and other sources in the United States and other capital markets. A nurse earning on average $100-$200 a month can hardly afford building a $25,000 facility. Our projections show that a successful franchisee will start making profits in less than two years, thus gaining ability to repay the loan.

With two prototype clinics already opened, and two others under construction, our goal is to expand the chain to 150 clinics in seven years.

The grant money we just won will help us fund a demonstration project and develop a billing system for third party payment.

We are aware that even relatively cheap medical services can be beyond the reach of those who live on $1 a day. That’s why from the beginning, our strategy was to have in place a third-party-payment arrangement with the national health insurance plan. A partnership we have formed with that plan will not only allow the poorest of the poor to gain access to essential health services, but also may change the way health care is delivered in Ghana. We hope it will create more opportunities for entrepreneurial private-sector providers. Private-public partnerships for healthcare in developing countries are an imperative in my view.