How Temie Giwa-Tubosun Built LifeBank Into Africa’s Leading Lifesaving Logistics Network

In Summary

• Temie Giwa‑Tubosun founded LifeBank after witnessing preventable deaths caused by a lack of blood and medical supplies.
• LifeBank has expanded across Nigeria, Kenya, and Ethiopia, delivering tens of thousands of units of blood, oxygen, vaccines, and other medical supplies to hospitals.
• The company has raised international funding, partnered with hospitals and governments, and saved over 40,000 lives through data-driven logistics.

Here’s a closer look at how Temie Giwa‑Tubosun’s vision turned LifeBank into a lifesaving network across Africa.

Deep Dive!!

Lagos, Nigeria, Tuesday, November 18 - Across Africa, hospital supply chains are often fragmented, leaving patients at risk of preventable deaths.

Temie Giwa‑Tubosun transformed a personal experience with life-threatening childbirth complications into LifeBank, a Pan-African health‑tech company that ensures hospitals receive blood, oxygen, and essential medical supplies when they need them most.

Using mobile platforms, data analytics, and innovative transport methods including motorcycles, boats, and drones, LifeBank bridges critical gaps in African healthcare.

This article explores how Temie Giwa‑Tubosun built LifeBank into a lifesaving network. It covers her early life and education, the inspiration for founding LifeBank, the problems it solves, milestones achieved, and lessons for African entrepreneurs aiming to use technology for social and healthcare impact.

Early Life, Education, and Experience

Temie Giwa‑Tubosun was born in December 1985 in Ila Orangun, Osun State, Nigeria, into a family that valued education and civic responsibility. Her father was a university professor and her mother a secondary‑school teacher, creating an environment where learning and social consciousness were central. She is the fourth of six children, and her early years were spent moving between Ila, Ilesha, and Ibadan.

At the age of ten, her family won a U.S. Diversity Visa, relocating to Minnesota to join her older siblings and begin a new chapter abroad.

In the United States, Temie completed her secondary education at Osseo Senior High School, graduating in 2003. She then earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Minnesota State University Moorhead in 2007. Driven by a desire to combine governance, health, and management, she pursued a Master’s in Public Administration and International Management at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, graduating in 2010 with a specialization in Health Systems Management.

This training directly gave her insight into health-delivery systems, policy implementation, and cross‑border development challenges skills she would later apply in building LifeBank.

Temie’s professional experience spans global health, public infrastructure, and media. She interned with the Department for International Development (DFID) in Abuja, Nigeria, where she witnessed the challenges of maternal healthcare firsthand, an experience that shaped her later mission with LifeBank. She also held a fellowship with the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva and, in 2011, joined the Global Health Corps in Uganda, working on the Millennium Villages Project under the United Nations Development Programme.

Returning to Nigeria in 2012, she wrote a weekly column for YNaija, sharing insights on health and governance, and contributed to Lagos State’s public infrastructure initiatives. From 2014 to 2015, she managed public awareness campaigns with Nollywood Workshops, producing educational content during the Ebola outbreak.

These experiences equipped Temie with a unique combination of analytical skills, operational knowledge, and deep empathy for public health challenges. Exposure to global health systems, hands-on work in underserved communities, and engagement with media and public institutions prepared her to address critical healthcare gaps.

This foundation would later inform the creation of LifeBank, a Pan‑African health logistics company that combines technology, data, and social impact to save lives across the continent.

Inspiration to Start LifeBank

Temie Giwa‑Tubosun’s drive to create LifeBank came from profoundly personal and transformative experiences. Early in her career, while interning with the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) in northern Nigeria, Temie Giwa‑Tubosun witnessed the critical gaps in healthcare supply chains, including hospitals struggling to access lifesaving blood and medical products.

Reflecting on her mission, she stated, “It’s not enough to save lives, we must do it sustainably.” This conviction inspired her to launch initiatives that would ensure that lifesaving supplies reach patients reliably, ultimately leading to the founding of LifeBank.

Years later, while giving birth to her own child in the United States, Temie nearly died from complications despite being in a hospital with top‑quality care. That experience underscored the stark disparities in maternal healthcare access between high‑resource and low‑resource settings. It became clear that millions of Nigerians face preventable deaths simply because lifesaving medical products are unavailable at the right time and place.

Motivated by these experiences, Temie launched the One Percent Blood Donation Enlightenment Foundation in May 2012, a nonprofit aimed at educating Nigerians about voluntary blood donation and improving distribution. However, she realized that real impact required a scalable, system-level solution. By January 2016, she had founded LifeBank, a technology-driven logistics company focused on delivering blood, oxygen, plasma, and vaccines to hospitals efficiently.

Temie has consistently described her mission with the words: “What keeps me going is that someone is about to die, and they don’t die.” This conviction, the idea that her work could literally save lives, became the guiding principle behind LifeBank.

Her inspiration blends personal experience, professional insight, and an unwavering commitment to solving one of Africa’s most urgent healthcare challenges, turning LifeBank into a Pan‑African platform that saves thousands of lives every year.

What Problem LifeBank Solves

LifeBank was founded to address critical gaps in Nigeria’s healthcare supply chain, a problem that has contributed to thousands of preventable deaths each year. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an estimated 10,000 women die annually in Nigeria from childbirth complications, many due to a lack of timely access to blood.

LifeBank’s model tackles systemic inefficiencies in hospitals, logistics, and blood distribution, while expanding to include oxygen, vaccines, and plasma to meet broader healthcare needs.

1. Lack of access to safe blood - Hospitals across Nigeria often face chronic blood shortages, leaving doctors unable to perform emergency transfusions. Studies and reports suggest that hospitals in Lagos and other major cities frequently experience blood shortages, sometimes occurring at least once a week, forcing families to source blood independently at great cost and risk. LifeBank provides a technology-enabled platform connecting blood banks directly to hospitals, tracking real-time availability, and ensuring timely delivery.
2. Inefficient healthcare logistics - Traditional medical supply chains in Nigeria are often fragmented, manual, and slow, resulting in delays that can cost lives. LifeBank’s logistics system uses route optimization, real-time inventory tracking, and dedicated delivery teams to ensure hospitals receive essential products within hours, not days. This efficiency reduces preventable deaths and improves operational capacity.
3. High maternal and child mortality - Maternal hemorrhage is Nigeria’s leading cause of maternal death, accounting for roughly 23% of maternal fatalities, according to UNICEF. LifeBank’s reliable blood delivery service directly addresses this by reducing delays during emergencies, ensuring that women and children can receive life‑saving treatment promptly.
4. Limited transparency in blood banking -  Many hospitals rely on informal networks to obtain blood, with no digital records of supply, expiration dates, or donor history. LifeBank introduces full transparency, digitizing inventory and delivery records to track every unit from donor to patient. This ensures quality, safety, and accountability in the supply chain.
5. Gaps in emergency response and critical care - Beyond blood, Nigerian hospitals face shortages of oxygen, vaccines, and plasma, especially during crises like COVID‑19. LifeBank expanded its model to deliver these essentials, helping hospitals respond to emergencies faster and more reliably.
6. Fragmented donor engagement - Low voluntary blood donation rates (about 2% of the eligible Nigerian population) regularly exacerbate shortages. LifeBank’s platform encourages donors, tracks contributions, and connects them to hospitals in need, creating a sustainable pipeline of lifesaving resources.
   
   By addressing these interrelated challenges supply shortages, inefficient logistics, limited transparency, and donor gaps LifeBank transforms fragmented healthcare delivery into a data‑driven, reliable system. Its model not only improves patient outcomes but also strengthens hospitals’ operational efficiency, creating a scalable framework that can expand across Africa.
   
   Through technology, data, and logistics, LifeBank tackles both the economic and social gaps in healthcare access, setting the stage for measurable impact across the continent.

Milestones Achieved to Date

LifeBank’s journey under Temie Giwa‑Tubosun’s leadership is marked by steady growth, measurable impact, and strategic scaling across Africa. Each milestone reflects innovation, data-driven operations, and social purpose, building a model that saves lives while strengthening healthcare systems.

Temie Giwa-Tubosun founded LifeBank in January 2016, after incubating her idea at Co‑Creation Hub (CcHUB) in Lagos. The platform started by connecting hospitals with blood banks and coordinating deliveries through a technology-enabled system. During its incubation phase, LifeBank delivered over 9,000 pints of blood, secured approximately US$200,000 in early-stage funding from CcHUB’s Growth Capital Fund, angel investors, and EchoVC, and signed up over 160 hospitals by 2018.

According to LifeBank’s 2021 report, the company has moved 155,569 units of blood, oxygen, vaccines, and other medical supplies, and claims to have saved more than 40,000 lives.

By mid-2018, LifeBank closed a US$200,000 seed round, led by EchoVC with participation from CcHUB and other angel investors. In 2019, Temie Giwa‑Tubosun won the Jack Ma Africa Netpreneur Prize, earning US$250,000 and global recognition for LifeBank’s innovative approach to saving lives.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, LifeBank expanded beyond blood delivery to include oxygen, vaccines, and other critical medical supplies, responding to urgent healthcare needs. The company launched AirCo, a modular oxygen plant in Nasarawa State in partnership with Oxygen Hub. 

LifeBank also created a national inventory of critical medical equipment, mapping ventilators, respirators, and ICU beds across Nigerian hospitals, and later began similar registrations in Kenya.

By 2022, LifeBank was selected for the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund, receiving a US$100,000 grant, further supporting its pan-African expansion. Around this time, LifeBank was supplying over 1,000 hospitals with blood, oxygen, and other essentials, moving 155,569 units and saving more than 40,000 lives.

LifeBank expanded operations into Kenya and began piloting services in Ethiopia, replicating its data-driven supply-chain model to address critical healthcare gaps beyond Nigeria. It established partnerships with governments, NGOs, and health systems to scale access, and launched the Blood Oxygen Access Trust (BOAT) Foundation to subsidize essential medical products for underserved patients.

Temie Giwa‑Tubosun’s work has earned multiple accolades: the Jack Ma Africa Netpreneur Prize (2019, US$250,000), the Global Citizen Prize for Business Leadership (2020), and the Cartier Women’s Initiative Award (Impact). These awards recognize both LifeBank’s innovative approach and its measurable social impact.

Through these milestones, LifeBank has evolved from a small, mission-driven startup into a continent-scale health-tech network, demonstrating how technology, logistics, and social purpose can combine to save lives, strengthen healthcare systems, and set a precedent for African startups addressing critical gaps.

Lessons for Other African Entrepreneurs

LifeBank’s growth and Temie Giwa‑Tubosun’s journey offer several practical lessons for African founders who aim to build businesses that scale, create jobs, and solve real problems. Each lesson is drawn from her experience, illustrating how strategy, social impact, and resilience intersect in African entrepreneurship.

1. Identify real, life-critical problems - LifeBank began because Temie saw firsthand the urgent need for a reliable blood supply in Nigerian hospitals. She turned a life‑or‑death problem into a business solution that directly saves lives. African entrepreneurs should focus on problems with significant societal impact, which often also have clear market demand.
2. Combining expertise across disciplines - Temie’s medical knowledge and logistics understanding, paired with her team’s technology and operations skills, allowed LifeBank to design a platform that was both operationally effective and tech-enabled. Entrepreneurs should leverage complementary skills within their teams to accelerate execution and strengthen decision-making.
3. Build for formalization and transparency - LifeBank digitized the healthcare supply chain, creating verified inventories, delivery tracking, and donor transparency. This approach formalized an informal, fragmented sector while increasing trust. African founders can transform informal markets by introducing transparency and measurable accountability.
4. Prioritize social impact alongside profit - LifeBank’s model demonstrates that a focus on saving lives and empowering communities can coexist with a financially sustainable business. Temie balanced social purpose with operational rigor, attracting investors and stakeholders who value impact. Entrepreneurs should design ventures that solve pressing social issues while generating revenue.
5. Scale strategically and adapt to conditions - LifeBank expanded across Nigeria and into Kenya and Ethiopia, but Temie carefully adapted operations to local contexts and focused on operational readiness before scaling. African founders must consider local challenges, regulations, and infrastructure before expanding.
6. Leverage funding to accelerate impact - Strategic fundraising, including seed rounds, grants like the Jack Ma Africa Netpreneur Prize, and Google for Startups support, enabled LifeBank to enhance logistics, technology, and reach. Entrepreneurs should use funding not just for growth, but to strengthen core capabilities and scale impact.
7. Diversify offerings to meet evolving needs - LifeBank expanded from blood delivery to oxygen, vaccines, and critical medical supplies during COVID‑19. Temie’s proactive diversification met urgent needs and strengthened market relevance. African entrepreneurs should adapt offerings to emerging market demands to remain essential.
8. Document impact with data - LifeBank tracks units delivered, hospitals served, and lives saved, using this data to optimize operations and demonstrate credibility. Founders should use data to measure impact, improve processes, and communicate value to investors and stakeholders.

A key achievement of LifeBank is the launch of the AirCo oxygen plant, a scalable solution that helps bridge Africa’s oxygen supply gap in partnership with Oxygen Hub. Looking forward, Temie Giwa‑Tubosun aims to expand LifeBank’s operations even further across the continent, deepening its impact by combining data, logistics, and empathy to save more lives.