Women Innovators Building Smarter Ways to Live, Eat and Stay Healthy in Africa , With Support from Bayer Foundation and Impact Hub

Across Africa, some of the most interesting solutions to everyday problems are being built by women who have experienced those problems up close.

A doctor sees patients struggling to access cardiac screening and builds an AI-powered ECG device.

A nurse watches patients lose hours navigating the healthcare system and creates a digital platform to make it easier.

A food entrepreneur sees farmers lose the value of their harvest and builds the processing infrastructure they need.

An agronomist looks at Morocco’s water crisis and asks a different question: what if we could grow more food with far less water?

These are the stories behind five of the 15 women named as 2026 Bayer Foundation Women Entrepreneurs Award winners globally, powered by the Impact Hub Network.

The five African awardees come from Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Morocco, joining 10 other women entrepreneurs selected from across Latin America and Asia.

From Kenya and Ethiopia to Nigeria and Morocco, their businesses are rethinking how communities access healthcare, preserve food and adapt to a changing climate. Each will receive €25,000 in non-dilutive funding alongside a six-month accelerator designed to help them strengthen their businesses and take their solutions further.

Meet the women behind the ideas

Dr. Alice Muhuhu of Aurora Health Systems, Kenya

Alice started Aurora Health Systems after seeing patients arrive at hospital with advanced heart conditions that could have been detected much earlier.

Her answer is an AI-powered, portable ECG device designed to work offline and in low-resource clinics. It can detect more than 50 cardiac conditions and is already being used across more than 100 clinics in Kenya.

But Alice is also tackling another problem in healthcare: whose data gets represented. Less than 1% of global ECG data comes from African populations, so Aurora is building a large-scale African cardiology dataset to help develop technology that better reflects the people it is intended to serve.

Beamlak Alemayehu of Medanit Digital Health, Ethiopia

For Beamlak, the healthcare problem was not always whether treatment existed. Sometimes, it was simply finding it.

The former clinical nurse and social worker founded Medanit after seeing patients travel long distances, wait hours, and move between hospitals and pharmacies just to find the right care.

Medanit brings those services together through an app, website and low-bandwidth call centre, allowing people to connect with doctors, medication and mental health services without requiring everyone to have the same level of internet access or digital literacy.

In 2025, the platform reached more than 58,000 users and onboarded over 500 doctors and 60 healthcare partners.

Funmilayo Ishola  of Dehydrator Hub, Nigeria

Funmilayo grew up watching her mother trade fresh produce in Lagos markets and saw how quickly food could lose its value when there was nowhere to process or preserve it.

That experience inspired Dehydrator Hub, which gives small food businesses and farmers access to solar-powered dehydrators, packaging equipment and technical training without requiring them to buy the machinery themselves.

More than 75 tonnes of fruit and vegetables have already been processed through the model, while farmers using the service have recorded income increases of 30–35%. Funmilayo has also trained more than 3,000 women.

Her bigger vision is to establish 776 processing hubs across Nigeria, one for every local government area.

Sokayna Bellam of Jodoor Greentech, Morocco

For Sokayna, the future of food begins with a simple question: how do you keep farming when water is becoming harder to find?

The agronomist founded Jodoor Greentech to explore that question through hydroponic farming. The company now operates 10 greenhouses across 3,500 square metres, producing around 100 tonnes of fresh produce annually.

The system uses up to 90% less water than conventional farming and eliminates chemical pesticides.

For Morocco and other water-stressed regions, it offers a glimpse of what agriculture could look like when farmers have to produce more with considerably less.

Omowunmi Emmanuel-Ogah of ExCare Health, Nigeria

During the COVID-19 pandemic, pharmacist Omowunmi encountered a mother who rushed into her pharmacy with her sick four-year-old son because she had nowhere else to turn.

The experience made her think differently about what a community pharmacy could be.

Today, ExCare Health combines pharmacy services with diagnostics, vaccination and primary care. It operates five pharmacies, two diagnostic laboratories and an accredited immunisation centre across Lagos and Ogun State.

Through its Vaxreach programme, ExCare has also helped turn eight pharmacies across five states into vaccination hubs.

Omowunmi’s ambition is to show what could happen if Nigeria’s thousands of community pharmacies became part of the country’s primary healthcare infrastructure.

Supporting women to take good ideas further

What connects these five women is not simply that they are working in technology, healthcare or agriculture.

It is that their businesses started with problems they could see around them.

The Bayer Foundation Women Entrepreneurs Award is designed to help founders like these move from solving a local problem to reaching more people. Since 2021, the Bayer Foundation has supported women led enterprises in health and food security through non-dilutive funding, networks and structured support for growth.

Through its partnership with the Impact Hub Network, the programme adds local entrepreneurial networks, mentorship and access to a wider community of impact-driven founders.

For the 2026 awardees, the next chapter is about scale: taking solutions that are already working and figuring out how far they can go.

Medanit Digital Health

Medanit Digital Health

Alice with Aurora Health Systems’ AI-powered portable ECG device

A doctor using Aurora Health Systems’ AI-powered portable ECG device.

Women participating in training supported by Dehydrator Hub

Jodoor Greentech’s Greenhouse

Jodoor Greentech’s Greenhouse

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