Bright Simons won a scholarship to Durham University but decided in the end that it was “not sufficiently practical”. He gave up an academic career to work in technology. Now the world is adopting his system.
“I had been in student politics and I had this idea I could help change things,” he says. He turned instead to migration studies, winning another EU scholarship, having decided that he wanted to help refugees. “But I felt that even that wasn’t practical enough.”
He realised that the greatest investment in technological infrastructure in Africa was coming from mobile telecom companies and all he needed was a good idea to convince them to give you access to this infrastructure since he had no money and needed to find an area where he could make an impact without a lot of money
The idea he came up with was tackling the problem of counterfeit medicine. Fake pills and pharmaceuticals are a massive problem in the developing world. The World Health Organisation estimates that they account for 30% of all medicines on sale, and kill up to 2,000 people daily worldwide, though other studies suggest the figure is even higher. Simons’s idea was to put a code on all packaging, enabling consumers to check if it was authentic or not with a simple text message.
His organisation, mPedigree, now works with 20 telecoms companies and is in discussions with two dozen more. Its system has appeared on 6.5m packs of medicine and been adopted as the national standard in three different countries.
Most exciting, perhaps, is that the system is now being taken beyond Africa. It’s become a model for the industry in India and is being extended across south Asia. It’s changing the traditional story about the continent and demonstrating that Africa can be the source of ground-breaking innovations. “This is a genuine reversal of the usual narrative.”
Simons is hopeful that it’s just the start. Innovation, he believes, has the power to transform Africa. “And it’s not going to be about shiny gimmickry as it often is in the west. It’ll be about innovation that has an impact on human lives.”
