(poignant music)
-: When the pandemic hit Africa in 2020,
the name of the game was resilience.
Presenter: Africa is facing a brutal resurgence
of the coronavirus pandemic.
-: We realized, suddenly, as African countries,
we had a strong dependency,
in terms of health care solutions,
from external parties.
We shaped a mechanism,
which we called Homegrown Solutions,
in order to really tackle this challenge of resilience.
Why was it homegrown?
Because we focused ourselves on local solutions.
And why do we call it accelerator?
Because the main question, in order to tackle resilience,
was to accelerate in terms of health care solutions.
-: What the Homegrown Solution Accelerator does,
is that it supports African entrepreneurs
to grow and scale their businesses
by partnering and offering tailored acceleration,
which is advice that can help them
to really move to the next level.
We look and focus
and select businesses that are domiciled in the continent,
first and foremost.
Secondly, the employee base has to be likely African.
-: The aha moment for me, really,
is this idea that when you look at the stats
and look at the challenges that seem insurmountable,
but when you engage a lot of these companies,
you find out there is actually a lot of innovation
that is on the ground to address these challenges,
and often what's needed is the capital,
and the management best practices,
to allow a lot of these companies to scale
and achieve the kind of impact that they are aspiring to.
-: The African Union Development Agency, AUDA-NEPAD,
together selected five specific companies
to be part of their first cohort,
and Revital Healthcare was proud to be selected.
At the end of 2020,
Revital Healthcare became the first local manufacturer
to manufacture the rapid test kits to detect COVID-19
in under 20 minutes, with accurate results.
Revital has now managed to establish a line of rapid tests
for malaria, for HIV, for hepatitis,
and for other high burden diseases
that continue to affect Africa.
And without the support
of the Homegrown Solution Accelerator Program,
this would not have been possible.
-: Now, not only are we able to supply these products
at a much more affordable price,
but we're bringing in international standards
to make sure that the people of Africa,
have the quality that they deserve.
-: We could easily replicate
the Homegrown Solutions Accelerator,
which was focused on healthcare solutions,
to the issues of food insecurity,
to climate change adaptation,
to renewable energies.
It applies to many domains.
So we have a potential for applicability
out of an experience of implementation
of a formula that worked.
(soft music)