Temie Giwa-tubosun, giving hope and saving lives for a living

Temie Giwa-tubosun is a Nigerian-american health manager, founder of Lifebank (formerly One Percent Project), a business enterprise in Nigeria working to improve access to blood transfusions in the country.

Temie attended Osseo Senior High School, Minnesota, and graduated in 2003. She then attended the Minnesota State University Moorhead and graduated in 2007. In 2008, she went to graduate school at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey from where she graduated in July 2010.

In January 2010, she went for a graduate fellowship at the World Health Organisation in Geneva, Switzerland, which lasted till July of that year when she graduated Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. She worked briefly at Fairview Health Services in Minnesota in 2010.

In August 2011, she began a fellowship with the Global Health Corps, and spent the next year at Mbarara, Uganda, working with the Millennium Villages Project a project of the United Nations Development Programme and Millennium Promise.

On May 21, 2012, Temie founded a non-governmental organisation called “One Percent Blood Donation Enlightenment Foundation” (or One Percent Project) with the aim of ending blood shortage, educating people on the importance of blood donation for anyone in need of blood, to overcome fears, prejudice, myths and apathy of people on blood donation, and to increase an efficient distribution network of blood in blood banks in Nigeria.

In January 2016, Temie founded Lifebank, a business organisation set up to tackle the problem of blood shortage in Nigeria. The founding was inspired by the birth of her first child and the complications from that experience. The technology and logistics company is based in Lagos, and incubated at CoCreation Hub in Yaba. As at January 2017, the company has helped deliver over 2000 pints of blood to patients across the state.

Temie got a spot as one of the winners of the $250,000 Africa Netpreneur Award. She was also awarded the Jack Ma African Business Hero award and also named the 2020 Laureate for Sub-saharan Africa at the Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards among others.

Childhood memories and influence till date I grew up in Nigeria. I was born in Southwest Nigeria. My parents were Professors and my dad taught at a school in Ile Ife. We lived in Ile Ife, but I was born in a place called Ila Orangun, it’s not a wellknown town, it’s very small and a lot of people don’t know it. My dad was teaching at the college of education then. I was born in this town, but I grew up in Ile Ife in Osun State.

So, we’re always in the college education environment. My mum also taught high school English and French. Basically, I just grew up as the fourth daughter of an amazing couple. I’m fourth out of six, we had quite a big family. It was really interesting. We read a lot. When I was about eight, my parents moved to the US, and I joined them a couple of years later. So, I finished my education, my growing up, teenage years in Minnesota.

I am a Lagos person, I grew up in a small sleepy university town in Southwest Nigeria…i think it was a lovely childhood and it was a childhood that was very simple and I think that has always kept me till where I am today. I think my happiest is when I’m at home with a good book, my family is around me, and I’m just simple. I think that simplicity with how I grew up is what drives me now. No matter how many accolades people give me, I never feel cool with myself because I just have that background of living simply, having simple pleasures, and just being close to family.

When did you come back to Nigeria?

I came back after living in the US for nine years. I came back for just a summer break and I went to work in Northern Nigeria. It was really fun. I got a gig to work for the summer in Abuja, and I got to Abuja, my company at the time said, “we’re going to send you to Kano”. I just loved it. I went to the market, got all these cute outfits. I didn’t even know that there was danger, I think that helped. At the time it was the beginning of Boko Haram and it had not become what it is now. I felt very safe. I remember I used to work between Kano, Jigawa, and Kaduna, I go down those three roads often in a week. I worked in healthcare, I was doing some research for this organisation and it was really fun.

Then I left, went back home, lived in Europe for a little bit, went to East Africa, lived in the US, and then finally moved back at the time with my fiancée in 2012.

When and why did you decide to set up Life Bank?

Since 2009 I have this singular passion for maternal healthcare. That’s my thing. Every day when I wake up, what keeps me going and excited about the work that I do is maternal healthcare. How do we get to save mothers? Although Life Bank that I run is not only saving mothers, it’s saving children with pneumonia, we did so much work around COVID-19. We do so much more now. But for me, what I care about is maternal health. It came from an incident that happened to me while I was in northern Nigeria. There was a young lady that our team saw when we went to a village. She had been in labour for a couple of days and she just needed a Csection and they couldn’t afford it. They couldn’t get her to a hospital in the big city and they were just waiting for her to die because clearly, she wasn’t going to survive this childbirth.

I remember feeling this is my life’s work. If I can do work that could rescue people like this woman, then I’ll know that I’ve progressed. And that’s what I did.

What personal experience also influenced starting Lifebank?

After having this passion for maternal healthcare, while I very young. I was 23 years old at the time; I was just beginning my life. I had this passion for maternal healthcare and I wasn’t a mum. It was just like an intellectual passion. Then a couple of years later, when I moved back to Nigeria, I was living here with my fiancée; we had gotten married and had a great life. I was working for the Lagos State government at the time, I had an NGO on the side that I was working on, and it was very simple. Then I got pregnant and went back home to the US to deliver my son, and it was really a difficult birth. I had a lot of complications. I had to have an emergency C-section. That woman that I met earlier, the problem that I ended up having was the exact problem she had. But within 20 hours, I was in the best hospital in the state, had over five doctors working on me; I had access to everything that I could need.

For me, what inspired me was the gap between what I lived through as a privileged young person and what she lived through as somebody who was poor, who lived in this region of the country where there is not a lot of resources. So, I decided that I was going to do something, take action, and start something to help rescue women in childbirth.

What role did you play during the COVID-19 period?

COVID-19 was one of those events you don’t hope happens again. It was a scary time. We knew since the beginning that it was important to have to use our skills that we had had before COVID-19 hit to help the country respond to it. The first thing we did was to build a testing centre.

We partnered with some government agencies, to build a testing centre. Before then, we knew nothing about building a testing centre, but we knew how to do uncommon things, we knew how to do things quickly, do it well because we’ve been distributing critical resources round the clock in multiple states in Nigeria. So, we used that experience to push and to make sure that we figured out how to distribute test kits. First, it was building centres, then we went into distributing test kits and picking up tests and driving it to the labs.

We then went deeply into medical oxygen, delivering medical oxygen round the clock, seven days a week, and really driving growth within that life cycle. We did some work around medical equipment, we saved thousands of lives, we conducted about 30,000 tests. When you look at how many people the Nigerian government tested and you compare Life Bank’s number, it’s really high and we are glad to have participated extensively. I’m incredibly proud because we partnered with amazing organisations.

Read the concluding part of our interview with TEMIE GIWA-TUBOSUN on our website www.businessday.ng as she graces our cover on Women’s Hub Magazine for this week.