Gates-Backed i3 Network Broke $19M in African Healthtech Deals

By Grace Kim

A network run by Salient Advisory and backed by the Gates Foundation has brokered roughly 760 introductions that produced 160-plus partnerships, pilots and MoUs worth more than $19 million for African healthtech startups. The program, called i3, doesn't hand out grants and hope. It ties the money to commercial deals.

Somto Chloe Keluo-Udeke, a Senior Consultant at Salient Advisory and a pharmacist by training, laid out the mechanics in an interview with Launch Base Africa's Charles Rapulu Udoh. "It's not just grants — it's commercial partnerships," she said. "We are very big on wanting commercial partnerships that are self-sustaining."

How the money works

i3 provides four offerings. The first is grant funding: up to $220,000 per company in the current cohort of seven growth-stage firms. In Phase 1, which ran from 2022, the program supported 60 companies at $50,000 each — 30 per year over two years.

The grants come with strings attached. i3 identifies blockers to partnerships and funds the fix. Tanzania's Dawa Mkononi, which provides inventory finance and management to pharmacies and hospitals, wanted working-capital partnerships with traditional banks so it could stop lending off its own balance sheet. It needed an in-house credit facility, upgraded tech and credit analyst capacity. i3 funded that, and the company has signed at least two bank partnerships since.

What does the deal facilitation look like?

Each company gets a relationship manager, monthly sit-downs and what Salient calls "bespoke deal facilitation." When a bricks-and-clicks online pharmacy wants partnerships with big pharmaceutical companies, i3 doesn't just make introductions — staff join the meetings, help founders translate, and structure what a contract could look like.

Since the current phase launched two years ago, i3 has made about 700 introductions, with over 400 in this year alone. Sponsors beyond the Gates Foundation include MSD, Sanofi, Boehringer Ingelheim, Endless Health and the Kühne Foundation, one of the world's largest supply chain foundations. Their executives sit on i3's steering committee.

One portfolio company raised debt funding from a pharmaceutical partner after an i3 introduction, then needed help gathering documents, building a data room and modeling impact in terms the lender would understand. i3 provided that support until the deal closed.

Where is the program active — and who's profitable?

i3 is Africa-wide, not just sub-Saharan. It has supported 63 companies from more than 20 countries, with deliberate targets on francophone Africa and women-led businesses. Activity is concentrated in Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa.

On profitability, Keluo-Udeke was blunt: "It is harder to get to profitability for healthtech companies." The network reaches about 6.8 million patients, but i3 measures success in partnerships, not patient counts.

Can regulators be partners?

The interview surfaced a pattern of regulators building with innovators. Nigeria's National Electronic Pharmacy Platform revised its 2021 rules — the 2026 version now recognizes pharmacy aggregators. Ghana's Pharmacy Council built its e-pharmacy platform with healthtech company RX Health. Rwanda Medical Supply Ltd built a data warehouse with Field Intelligence.

"Once they start to work with one, they start to work with many others," Keluo-Udeke said. For Sproxil, which pioneered scratch-code drug authentication with NAFDAC, i3 provided a government relations expert with decades in the sector to broker relationships with the Pharmacists Council of Nigeria.

The 0.3% NPL story

Dawa Mkononi's 0.3% non-performing loan rate — extraordinary for unsecured pharmacy lending — comes from its Dawa Kwanza program, a partnership with NMB Bank and Vodacom. The company assigns a credit score to every pharmacy in its network and supplies their medicines, which keeps risk visibility high. The program targets 20,000 pharmacies and clinics across Tanzania and currently reaches over 3,000, so Keluo-Udeke expects the NPL to normalize as the portfolio scales.

Access Bank in Nigeria is building a specialized health practice, and she welcomes it. "Not at all" was her answer to whether bank health units could disintermediate startups.

What happens when the grants end?

i3 was never funded by USAID, so it was untouched by those budget cuts. The current phase runs through 2027, and Keluo-Udeke said announcements on the program's future are coming soon. "I fully expect i3 to endure," she said, adding that the program is "continuously designing sustainable models."

Her read on donor capital: it's contracting, and that's permanent. "Funding cuts are here to stay," she said. The role of donor funding should be catalytic — take risks, generate evidence, then exit and let the business run. "The future isn't just grants."

The next cohort is the "Future of Pharmacy" — a channel choice grounded in data showing 40% to 60% of people's first contact with health systems in several African countries happens at pharmacies. i3's bet: strengthen that channel, and the exits — maybe even an African healthtech unicorn — follow.