HealthCap Africa Urges Pension Funds to Finance Healthcare 

Kayode Tokede 

As international donor funding from USAID and other foreign assistance programs for healthcare continues to shrink, leading financial stakeholders convened by HealthCap Africa, at its Private Markets & Healthcare Roundtable called for a stronger domestic capital ecosystem to help finance Africa’s critical healthcare needs. 

Pension fund representatives at the meeting came from institutions collectively managing more than $5 billion in assets under management.   Themed Healthcare as an Asset Class, the invitation-only roundtable held recently in Lagos, alongside HealthCap Africa’s Annual General Meeting. 

Speaking at the event, Founder and General Partner of HealthCap Africa, Dr. Ola Brown highlighted Quadria Capital’s healthcare-focused investment platform in India and its scale as an illustration of what sustained private investment can build. “Quadria Capital is one of the largest VC funds in Asia focused on healthcare.  “They have raised over $1 billion and have an AUM of over $4 billion. As you know, many Nigerians go to India for healthcare. Now imagine how much private capital has gone into building their healthcare sector.” The investment has coincided with a decline in maternal mortality from 384 to 80.5 per 100,000 live births between 2000 and 2023,” she added. 

Speaking on this, CEO of ABC Health, Dr. Mories Atoki said: “There needs to be more early-stage investors. There’s no such thing as an unbankable project. There’s only such a thing as a risk-investor match. Some are early-stage, some are later-stage, and we need to match the right investors, or we need to invest in the early-stage ecosystem if we want to get to growth”