Building Trust Before Tech: Rethinking Health Innovation in Francophone Africa

In African tech circles, we like to talk about product market fit, AI, interoperability, and scale. In health, we should probably start with something less glamorous and more uncomfortable: trust.

If you have spent time building or funding health solutions in Francophone Africa, you know the pattern. A digital health pilot launches with enthusiasm, the technology works, the case study looks great, then twelve months later the usage curves fall flat. The official explanation is usually that the market is not ready or resistant to change.

In my experience, markets are rarely “not ready”. More often, people simply do not trust what we are asking them to use.

At Tanel, we build digital health infrastructure in Senegal and across Francophone West Africa. Along the way, we made several early mistakes common to young healthtech companies. What saved us was not better code, it was a different posture. We learned that in our markets, innovation sticks only when the people who use it believe in the intentions, reliability, and staying power of the team behind it.

This is a message for founders and for investors. If you are building or backing health innovation in Francophone Africa, your most important infrastructure is not your cloud stack. It is your credibility.

So the real question is not How do I make people adopt my product. It is: Am I building tech that people already trust, or am I building tech I hope they will trust later?

Here are a few lessons from our journey.

1. Build relationships before you build products

Before Tanel was a healthtech company, we were guests in clinics, pharmacies, and waiting rooms. We sat with nurses who had seen several health innovation projects come and go. We listened to pharmacists who still had unpaid invoices from previous schemes. We heard patients say the last time someone promised cashless care, they still had to pay.

Those conversations changed our roadmap. Our first minimum viable product was not an app. It was showing up consistently, listening carefully, and solving one very small problem that mattered to our partners.

Instead of arriving with a finished product and a slide deck, we co-created with health workers and administrators. Sometimes that meant delaying a feature so that it fit the way a clinic actually worked on Monday morning, not how a consultant imagined it in a report. Sometimes it meant pausing a sales push to sit with a regulator and understand what scared them about digitalization.

Your first MVP is as much about establishing credibility as it is about product. 

Our founder journey

Our journey as founders did not begin with a grand plan to become a health insurance company. It started with in-home primary care visits and prescription deliveries. We spent our days inside people’s homes listening to their frustrations about access, affordability, and paperwork. Those experiences pushed us to build pharmacy management software, because we saw first-hand how pharmacies struggled with stockouts, recordkeeping, and manual workflows. 

From there, we realized insurers were facing their own operational challenges, so we built insurance management software for them as well. Eventually, we understood that to truly improve outcomes and access, we needed to become a health insurer ourselves. Each step forced us to understand a new layer of the health system, and each step taught us that trust is earned through proximity, patience, and a willingness to evolve based on what real users need.

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2. Treat local context as a competitive advantage, not a constraint

One of the most common mistakes in Francophone Africa is to treat local language, culture, and regulation as obstacles to scale. In healthtech, this is especially dangerous. If the people you serve do not hear themselves in your product, they will not trust it.

We learned this lesson the hard way. When we launched our pharmacy management software at our very first pharmacy, we did not even think about the possibility that internet speeds would be much slower than what we were used to in our office. The Wifi connection in the pharmacy was weak, screens took too long to load, and basic actions felt heavy. Within days, the pharmacy asked us to delay the full rollout. We were concerned but motivated to improve. It was a humbling reminder that building locally requires designing for the real infrastructure of independent providers. Our solution was to rebuild the product so it could work offline, ensuring that slow internet, power cuts, or outages would never interrupt care. That early setback shaped our entire product philosophy.

We also had to understand how the word digital is interpreted in our markets. Selling digital solutions in healthtech is tough because most providers assume you are referring to an old desktop software they once installed on a computer. Many pharmacies believed they were already digital because they were using older tools that no longer met their needs. So when we first approached them, they dismissed us before we could even explain what our platform did. It took time to learn how to communicate the value of modern tools in a market where digital often means legacy systems and past frustrations.

Data protection posed another trust barrier. Independent pharmacies worried that sharing transaction data would expose them to competitors or regulators. Others simply did not understand why a tech company needed anything beyond basic information. These concerns came from years of being approached by companies that overpromised and underdelivered. To build confidence, we had to be transparent, patient, and unwavering in demonstrating that their data remained theirs - and that our success relied on protecting their trust, not exploiting it.

We spent months inside a rural pharmacy to understand daily workflows, fears, and motivations. That proximity grounded us. It also taught us something important: we will never have 100 percent market share, and that is fine. Some providers may continue using paper-based systems long-term. Some will stick to old software. Our job is not to convert everyone. Our job is to show value, consistently and respectfully, until adoption becomes a choice - not a concession.

Beyond these early lessons, we had to accept a deeper reality. Building for health in Francophone Africa is challenging because most providers operate independently. Pharmacies and most clinics are small, privately owned, and focused on day-to-day survival. They are not thinking about system-wide efficiencies or the macro effects of digitization. In markets like the United States, a chain such as CVS or Walgreens understands the economies of scale that digital infrastructure brings. In our markets, each provider makes decisions based on immediate, individual needs. This means that large-scale transformation stories resonate only after you’ve solved specific, practical problems for individual providers. You have to solve specific micro-problems for each stakeholder so they choose to adopt your tools. Until you do that, the bigger narrative does not resonate.

These realities highlight a simple truth. In Francophone Africa, your intimacy with context is one of the few advantages that a better funded foreign competitor cannot copy. Use it.

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3. Treat health data as emotional, not just legal

We talk about data privacy in legal terms. In health, data is also deeply emotional. When a mother shares her child’s medical history with your platform, she is not thinking about GDPR clauses. She is asking herself one question: if something goes wrong, will I regret trusting these people?

Health is an especially unique industry because we are asking people to share some of the most intimate details of their lives with us. Their illnesses, their medications, their vulnerabilities, their fears. These are not just data points. They are pieces of a person’s identity and dignity. When someone gives you that level of information, they are placing you in a position of deep responsibility. That is why trust matters far more in health than in most other sectors. If people do not feel protected, respected, and understood, they will never share the information that digital health systems rely on.

African consumers have historically had limited clarity on how their data was used. In health insurance and healthcare, the stakes are even higher. A leak, miscommunication, or misinformation can significantly erode trust.

At Tanel, we learned that trust in our data practices had to be visible, not just compliant. That meant explaining in simple language how data flows, who can see what, and what we will never do with it. That meant designing for consent by default and making it easy to opt out. It meant being honest when we did not yet have the perfect solution, but showing that we took concerns seriously.

This clarity also matters to investors. Mishandling health data is both an ESG liability and a regulatory crisis waiting to happen. Investors increasingly see strong data governance as a growth driver, because in health, data trust equals user loyalty. The companies that win will be those whose patients, providers, and partners genuinely believe their data is safer inside the platform than outside it.

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4. Collaborate with the system instead of trying to outsmart it

Every health founder has felt the frustration of navigating public institutions. The meetings can be long, and the processes can feel opaque, and the timelines rarely match a startup’s cash runway.

It is tempting to see ministries, insurance regulators, and public hospitals as obstacles to be bypassed. In Francophone Africa, that is a false shortcut. Health systems are complex, but they are also the only path to scale that reaches low-income patients at meaningful depth.

We made the decision early to treat the health system as a partner, not a competitor. That meant aligning our products with national health priorities. It meant being patient as regulators developed comfort with digital claims, telemedicine, and innovative payment models. It meant accepting that some deals would take months longer than we hoped, but would be far more durable once signed.

We also realized that building trust with regulators requires more than compliance. Many regulators in our region are skeptical of healthtech startups, and not without reason. They have seen companies enter the market with strong enthusiasm, only to struggle with sustainability. When we engaged with them, we had to show not just innovation but durability. We had to demonstrate that we were funded, committed, and stable enough to support public priorities over multiple years. Working closely with them has allowed us to build mutual trust and position ourselves as partners who understand the weight of national health responsibilities, not just the ambitions of a startup.

This ability to collaborate strategically with regulators and public actors is something investors value deeply. Experienced investors understand that real health systems change is gradual. It is shaped through repeated engagement with government agencies, multilateral partners, and professional bodies. The companies that endure are those that show up to policy conversations, share anonymized data that improves public decision-making, and prove that digital tools can strengthen the system - not undermine it.

Integration often builds scale faster than attempting to disrupt entrenched systems. Especially in health.

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5. Choose investors who understand that trust takes time

Not all capital is suited for health innovation in our markets. You do not just need money. You need investors who understand that trust is built in years, not quarters.

When we began seeking partners, we looked for investors whose thesis aligned with the realities we lived daily - those who could help us enter more mature markets like Nigeria, who understood Francophone contexts without bias, and who offered meaningful support beyond capital. Ventures Platform became one of those partners. By the time we met their team, they had already backed some of Africa’s leading technology companies, giving them a clear sense of what it takes to build from pre-seed through Series A and beyond, and their portfolio included teams that had weathered regulatory shifts, pricing shocks, and tough operating environments. Just as importantly, their partners had founded companies or played key roles in scaling respected startups, so they understood the pressure of hiring, fundraising, and shipping with limited resources - and the need to balance investor expectations with on-the-ground realities. That lived experience assured us they would support long-term trust building, not just short-term growth metrics.

The right capital is patient, connected, and context aware. It opens doors with policymakers, convenes peer learning across markets, and protects founders from pressure to grow at a speed that compromises long-term credibility.

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Redefining what innovation means in Francophone Africa

In many ecosystems, innovation is still measured by who launches first, who raises the largest round, or who gets the most headlines. If you are building in health in Francophone Africa, you need a different definition.

The real innovators are not just the first to market. They are the first to be trusted by patients, nurses, pharmacists, HR teams, and regulators. They are the ones whose products feel grounded in local reality. They are the ones who can look a public official in the eye and say we will still be here in five years, and we will still be accountable to you.

At Tanel, we are still learning. We continue to learn and adapt.  What keeps us moving forward is a simple conviction: in our markets, trust is the real infrastructure. Build that well, and your tech will follow.

We also learned something fundamental about impact. The fastest way to build meaningful health infrastructure is not to create solutions that try to replace or compete with existing healthcare actors. In most African markets, providers are protected in various ways, entrenched in the fabric of communities, and central to how care is delivered. Competing with them is often impractical and ultimately less effective. Empowering them is far more powerful. When you strengthen pharmacies, clinics, insurers, and hospitals, you strengthen the health system itself. You create scale by lifting the stakeholders who already serve millions every day.

For founders, that may mean spending a few more weeks in clinics before writing your first line of code. For investors, it may mean backing teams whose superpower is building credibility with frontline providers and regulators.

If we can align around that, then Francophone Africa’s healthtech revolution will not just be impressive on slides. It will be felt where it matters most - by people finally experiencing healthcare that is both digital and dependable.

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About Mouhammed Ndoye

Mouhamed Ndoye is an accomplished entrepreneur and technology professional with extensive experience in various leadership and technical roles. Currently serving as Co-Founder and CEO at Tanél Health since August 2020, Mouhamed is dedicated to building insurance infrastructure to improve healthcare access in Africa. 

Previously, Mouhamed co-founded and led Anythng, a startup focused on enhancing restaurant-customer connections before the onset of COVID-19. He was a Senior Consultant at Cardinal Solutions, providing expertise to notable clients such as Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble. 

Mouhamed holds a Master's degree in Information Technology and Management from Texas McCombs School of Business and a Bachelor's degree in Management Information Systems from Xavier University.