MyItura, a health-tech startup, has unveiled MediLoan, a new financing product designed to make healthcare more accessible, affordable, and digitally inclusive for millions of Nigerians and other African countries as it expands.
To bridge Nigeria’s critical health financing gap, with more than 70 percent of healthcare payments in Nigeria made out of pocket, a single medical emergency can push families into financial crisis, which led to MyItura’s unveiling of MediLoan.
MyItura describes MediLoan as the first step in creating a unified, tech-enabled healthcare financing ecosystem, one where an unexpected illness no longer means selling assets, delaying treatment, or falling into poverty.
Shina Arogundade, MyItura’s founder and CEO, shared a personal pain that is also a national problem, where he disclosed a personal story from 2018. “After a severe tooth infection, he discovered that although he had health insurance, it covered only N20,000 of a N420,000 procedure.
“I didn’t have the balance. I had to wait months, enduring the pain. That experience made me realise how many people face worse. People who even have insurance still end up bankrupt,” he recounted.
He noted that this lack of health financing has two major consequences which are that families become financially devastated by medical bills, and healthcare providers lack liquidity to invest in digital tools, equipment, and quality care.
“We are solving for this, users will finally have access to care when they need it, and providers will have the liquidity to operate sustainably. We are just getting started, and we are open to partnership,” Arogundade said.
Stephanie Okpere, head of digital health innovations at Co-Creation Hub (CcHUB), said this is a crucial milestone for Nigeria’s health innovation. She noted that MediLoan aligns strongly with CcHUB’s three core pillars for strengthening Nigeria’s health system, which are improving quality of care, improving access to care, and improving the capacity of the health workforce.
“We set tough milestones, and MyItura’s team met them every time. That’s what gives you confidence that a startup will succeed,” she said.
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Okpere shared a sobering story from a nurse whose hospital lost a newborn because a power outage shut down the incubator, and there was no money to fix the generator.
“Financing is not just money, but it is the difference between life and death. Solutions like MediLoan can help facilities get the resources they need to save lives,” she noted.
Experts noted that partnership, data, and risk are central to health-tech financing during the discussion on ‘The Power of Partnership in Health-Tech Financing,’ at the launch event as Arogundade, CEO of MyItura, stated that most healthcare systems in Nigeria are still paper-based and there is a need to digitise them and create structures for low-income earners.
“MediLoan should have existed years ago, but risks had to be understood. Yes, health loans naturally come with high Non-performing loan risk, but we should be able to keep it low with partnerships and data,” he said. “We are willing to work with everyone. If we get this right, we can change healthcare financing in Nigeria forever.”
Jean Omefe, project manager at CcHUB, noted that the health financing gap hits women, children, and low-income families hardest. “We support innovations that close that gap, and importantly, we don’t build solutions for people, but we build with them; that’s why we run problem-solving workshops.”
Emmanuel Badejo, COO of Lifecenter, stated that we need more data to unlock responsible health lending. “If people don’t have a traditional credit history, we can use alternative data, which is income, spending patterns, and mobile data usage. With AI and machine learning, we can detect patterns that predict a borrower’s reliability.
The event closed with a call for collaboration across the health, finance, and tech sectors.
“We are willing to work with everyone,” Arogundade said. “If we get this right, we can change healthcare financing in Nigeria forever.”
