By Susan A. Hughes
Adebayo Alonge MC/MPA 2024 has built a career keeping fake medications out of Africa. Now he wants to invest in its future.
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The Mid-Career Master in Public Administration (MC/MPA) Program and its Edward S. Mason cohort provide rare opportunities for experienced professionals to hone their skills while connecting with peers who are making an impact in their fields.
It’s exactly this kind of community Adebayo Alonge MC/MPA 2024 was looking for and what he found as a Cheng Fellow in the New World Social Innovation Fellows Program at Harvard Kennedy School.
“I have my family with me, and I’m working on a business,” he says. “It's very hard to socialize—you don't have time to start sorting people by whether or not they're aligned with your values. The [Cheng Fellows] community is already sorted for me. They are social innovators whose values are aligned. These are people who want to make a difference in the world. They became my tribe.”
Alonge, who is from Ibadan, Nigeria, worked as an entrepreneur and social innovator before coming to HKS. As the founder and CEO of RxAll—a healthcare tech platform that secures and provides safe pharmaceuticals in Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda—he is tackling a crisis that is devestating Africa: fake medications.
Many of these drugs, he explains, are imported, unregulated, and cheaply made. “Fake drugs kill nearly a million people each year,” he says. “Over 50% of drugs in some markets are substandard. People have no way of knowing the quality before they use them.”
He speaks from personal experience.
When Alonge was 15 years old, he was fighting off an illness that required him to take Salbutamol, a medication that relaxes the airways to make it easier to breathe. His father filled his prescription at their local pharmacy, unaware what he was buying was counterfeit. It put Alonge in a 21-day coma, nearly killing him.
“These fake drugs have flooded the market,” he says. “This is what is available when a pharmacy goes to buy, and the assumption is ‘Oh, the regulators have done the work.’”
RxAll works with drug manufacturers, hospitals, and pharmacies on drug testing, pharmacy management software, and an invoicing platform to help ensure the integrity of imported medicines.
“I came to the Kennedy School because so much of my work is public facing. I engage with the FDAs for all of the countries I work with. ... I was frustrated because I didn't understand their public sector language or their way of operating.”
Adebayo Alonge MC/MPA 2024
Motivated by his near-death experience, Alonge went on to the University of Ibadan in Nigeria to study pharmacy. His final project focused on miniaturizing benchtop spectrophotometers, instruments that can determine the amount of a known chemical substance by measuring the intensity of light that passes through a sample solution.
“My thesis was, if I could take these benchtop spectrophotometers that are used for quality assurance in the lab and miniaturize them, they could be a tool for pharmacies to test medications themselves,” he explains.
His project was successful but without the funding he needed, Alonge went into pharmaceutical sales to help pay for his prototype.
He eventually enrolled in the Yale School of Management where he got the chance to build a business plan with a mentor alum and received funding from the school for the prototype. “Eventually, Yale gave us the initial funding to get off the ground,” he says.
There were more successful rounds of prototypes. He was able to get into an accelerator program in Norway, which led to an accelerator program in China. Eventually, Alonge raised several million dollars in seed funding.
RxAll was born.
It was the COVID-19 pandemic that expanded his drug testing enterprise into software management. “Many of our pharmacists couldn’t get to their pharmacies to sell anything because the government had shut down the country and markets,” he remembers. “Our clients were asking if we could help them build an e-commerce software product. That’s how we extended from drug testing to point-of-sale software.”
Alonge realized he needed to deepen his understanding of his operation now that he was interacting with government agencies.
“I came to the Kennedy School because so much of my work is public facing. I engage with the FDAs [food and drug administrations] for all of the countries I work with,” he explains. “These are very senior government leaders and government agencies, and I was frustrated because I didn't understand their public sector language or their way of operating.”
While he had success in the private sector, he didn’t understand why the public sector was dragging its feet.
His point of clarity came in class with Ricardo Hausmann, founder and director of Harvard’s Growth Lab and the Rafik Hariri Professor of the Practice of International Political Economy.
“Professor Hausmann said to me: ‘Adebayo, you're always looking at the other side of the river [referring to Harvard Business School across the Charles River from HKS] where they're looking at optimizing private welfare. In this school, our focus is optimizing public welfare.’”
Only then did Alonge realize why he had trouble with public officials. “This was why these guys drag their feet—they're not just thinking about me and the solution I'm bringing,” he says. “They’re thinking about the entire ecosystem and how the action of taking up my solution would reflect, be perceived, and be addressed by the rest of the public.”
After graduating from HKS in May, Alonge plans to expand his business from three to eight countries across Africa. “That's my goal,” he says. “I currently employ 65 people and expect to be at over 200 in the next four years.”
He also plans to use what he learned at HKS to expand the work of his organization, The Adebayo Alonge Family Foundation, to provide scholarships to young people to learn digital skills. Currently, the foundation is training 40 people.
“Africa is so young. There is a lot of talent,” he explains. “We need to invest in our youth. We need to be mentoring them and providing them with the seed funding to stand on their own two feet. That's what this foundation is going to be focused on.”
“Africa is so young. There is a lot of talent. We need to invest in our youth. We need to be mentoring them and providing them with the seed funding to stand on their own two feet.”
Adebayo Alonge MC/MPA 2024
But it’s that sense of community that he reflects on most—an added benefit to his HKS experience.
“It’s been very helpful to me to have a social impact language to speak about my work, but it is also helpful to have feedback from colleagues across Harvard,” he says. “I've been doing this for over eight years, so blind spots have developed in the way I work. My colleagues have helped with the blind spots. I would say it's one of the best parts of being at HKS these past 10 months.”
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Portraits by Lydia Rosenberg
