Rest Essence never expected to watch a family friend come close to dying while giving birth.

It was around 1 a.m. when she went into labour, and she was taken from one hospital to another. The first hospital refused to admit her for reasons that remain unclear, while the second had no electricity. Under the glow of handheld flashlights at the third hospital, she delivered her second child by caesarean section. She then began haemorrhaging, and for a moment, Essence feared she would not survive. 

She did, but that experience changed the course of his own life.

At the time, Essence had challenged himself to spend a year searching for a problem worth solving in Africa. That night gave his search a direction, he told TechCabal. 

“That experience opened my eyes to how big of a problem medical emergencies are in Nigeria and across Africa,” he said. “That was when it dawned on me that this is a problem worth solving. I had known how 911 operated outside of the country, but I kept questioning why it wasn’t functional in Nigeria.”

Around the same time, he joined the Fishbowl Challenge, where participants formed teams to solve real-world problems. There, he met Dr Muyiwa Oluwatobi, Dr Glennise Ayuk and Abakar Mahamat, who joined the team through the challenge. 

The four founders realised that, rather than solving just one part of the emergency care puzzle, they wanted to build the infrastructure that could get people help faster when every second mattered. Together, they set out to build Medwaka, an emergency response platform that connects patients experiencing medical emergencies with nearby hospitals, ambulances, and trained first responders through a mobile app. 

Day 1: Rebuilding what already existed 

Before the Fishbowl Challenge, Dr Oluwatobi had begun piloting an early model in Ondo State, south-western Nigeria. The platform focused on blood donation and emergency support for pregnant women by connecting expectant mothers with blood donors during medical emergencies. 

When Essence and the other co-founders joined the project through the Fishbowl Challenge, they saw a bigger opportunity. The problem, Essence believed, was that people did not know where to go during emergencies and no coordinated system could get someone from the point of distress to the care they needed. 

“The problem we were solving initially wasn’t large-scale enough,” he told TechCabal. “We realised the actual problem we needed to solve was much bigger.” 

The team went back to the drawing board, speaking with healthcare professionals, ambulance providers and emergency responders to understand how emergency care worked. 

The end result was Medwaka, turning the blood drive platform into an emergency response network. Through a mobile app, people experiencing medical emergencies could be connected to nearby hospitals and ambulances. With that vision in place, the team developed the first prototype and officially launched Medwaka in 2024. By February that year, the rebuilt Medwaka was ready for its first pilot in Ondo State.

Day 500: When reality set in

When Medwaka began its pilot in Ondo State, it had a clear plan: train first responders, partner up with hospitals, and give people a number to call during emergencies. However, the team faced challenges it did not anticipate, including low awareness of emergency response services, the difficulty of building a reliable first responder network, and the lack of ambulance infrastructure.

The team started by training healthcare workers and local volunteers as first responders in Ondo State while onboarding public and private hospitals to the platform, Essence said. He explained that they recruited people with motorbikes who knew their neighbourhoods well enough to reach a patient before an ambulance could. 

The goal was that if an emergency occurred, Medwaka should already have someone nearby who could respond before a patient reached the hospital. By the end of 2024, Medwaka had trained 10 first responders and brought 5 hospitals onto the platform. But a bigger obstacle lay ahead of them. 

The founders had envisioned Medwaka as a 911-style emergency response system, Essence noted, but they realised that such ambition depended on infrastructure they did not control. Buying ambulances was beyond the reach of an early-stage startup, and relying on hospitals’ existing fleets meant dealing with delays and inconsistent availability. 

“It was either you bought your own ambulance, or you partner with hospitals that currently have ambulances,” he said. “We had a lot of challenges navigating that model.”

Day 1000: Rethinking emergency response

Due to the ambulance problem, Essence and his co-founders made a decision that would reshape Medwaka’s entire strategy. They decided to stop trying to run an independent 911-style system without the ambulances to back it up, and lean fully into partnerships instead.

“Instead of trying to run this 911 system when we knew we couldn’t get ambulances, we decided to just continue with partnerships,” Essence said. “That was the biggest thing we did.”

From then on, he noted that the company began shifting its partnership focus away from public health institutions and toward private hospitals and health maintenance organisations (HMOs), governments, emergency agencies, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and community organisationsincluding University of Medical Sciences, Ondo. 

According to Essence, the partnership model changed how Medwaka created impact, allowing it to focus on strengthening existing emergency response systems.

The company also expanded its offerings to include emergency response technology, first responder capacity building, digital emergency coordination tools, and healthcare system integration, he said. 

Today, Medwaka says it has grown to a team of 20, trained 11 first responders, and facilitated more than 550 emergency requests through its platform and partner network. 

For  Essence, however, the company’s ambition remains unchanged from the night he watched a family friend fight for her life: to build an integrated emergency response ecosystem that connects patients, healthcare providers, first responders, and public health institutions through technology.