Chika Madubuko – The Entrepreneur Who Is Changing the Game In Geriatrics

FOUNDER of Greymate Care

COUNTRY: NIGERIA

SECTOR: Biotech

THE GLOBAL DIGITAL HEALTH MARKET IS growing by leaps and bounds and billions, and Chika Madubuko, the CEO and Founder of Greymate Care, is wanting to make the most of it whilst creating impact. With money not the only objective, it was the opportunity to serve those who needed quality healthcare the most that guided her.

Chika Madubuko: EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION

Chika Madubuko is the third-born child in a family of five children. Born in the northern region of Nigeria, Chika holds a BSc degree (Applied Microbiology and Brewing) from Nnamdi Azikiwe University and a Masters degree (Biotechnology) from University of Hertfordshire.

PROFESSIONAL LIFE

After graduating she decided to take a leaf out of her entrepreneurial parents’ handbook and venture into business development and sales in the UK before relocating to Nigeria to continue as a business development manager at Novus Agro, a multisided platform that organizes smallholder farmers into accessible groups for all those who want to transact with them.

Chika Madubuko is a goal-getter amd experienced business professional with experience in multinationals such as Amazon UK and Guinness Nigeria Plc.

All she wanted to do at the time is solve problems with bio-tech, with everyday biological systems, creating drugs and industrial solutions. When she was about to leave the UK, she toyed with the idea of creating a homecare startup and she was a certified care-giver but she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with it. Given her success in business development, she decided to give it a try and some people told her this was a real problem Nigerians were facing.

In Nigeria, it is customary for other family members to look after a sick loved one. Wives or moms who stayed at home used to play this role. However, with a considerable gender shift in recent years, with more women employed or self-employed and no longer staying at home 24 hours a day, the elderly who require round-the-clock home care are facing issues.

Greymate Care helps in this situation. Madubuko’s service offering is built on providing qualified experts to care for vulnerable family members, as a result of the personal agony she experienced when looking for a care-giver for her grandmother in the village.

Greymate Care is an online platform that connects the elderly to vetted care-givers right in the comfort of their homes. In Nigeria, there is no database where you can simply go and find a caregiver or someone who has been trained and background-checked. Greymate Care solves that problem by training people who want to become care givers and making sure they have guarantors and they are available to be deployed to your home. We reduce the turnaround time of finding a care-giver from about two months to let’s say an hour or maximum 48 hours

Greymate Care is the uber for home care. It is an online platform that connects the elderly to a vetted and insured caregiver/doctor/nurse at the click of a button. They take the stress of care off busy professionals using technology. Greymate Care not only solves the problem of finding a companion right in the comfort of one’s home but we also have the potential of providing 10,000 jobs within Africa.

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Honors

Chika Madubuko has in her name, several awards including the She Leads Africa Accelerator 2017 Bronze Prize sponsored by Intel US, OCP Africa and GTB.

She represented Nigeria at the Women in Africa Initiative hosted in Morocco and sponsored by Renault Global and King Mohammed V, the Prime Minister of Morocco,with other notable personalities such as former Minister of Finance, Mrs Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s Nobel Laureate, Prof Wole Soyinka, and the daughter of MKO Abiola, Mrs Hafsat Abiola-Costello.

She was part of Nigeria’s 25 under 25 most innovative entrepreneurs in 2017. She also received an award for Social Innovation by Women in Africa Philanthropy Entrepreneurs Club Programme.