In a hospital emergency ward, a three-hour delay searching for prescribed medication is not an inconvenience—it can be fatal. In 2020, while working in an Ethiopian public emergency room, nurse and social worker Beamlak Alemayehu watched patients lose critical hours moving from pharmacy to pharmacy just to locate essential drugs and tests. Some never survived the wait. Determined to fix the fragmentation, she set out to build Medanit in 2022 as a clean digital directory.
But when she approached clinics and pharmacies, she hit a wall: between 80% and 90% of them still ran entirely on manual paper ledgers. There were simply no digital records to plug into.
Realising she could not just be a consumer-facing middleman, Alemayehu took on the heavy lifting: writing hospital management software, building electronic medical records (EMR), setting up pharmacy delivery logistics, and launching a dedicated call centre to ensure rural farmers and mothers without smartphones were not left behind. Today, Medanit has onboarded over 520 doctors, logged 1.2 million platform visitors, and secured backing from the Bayer Foundation as it prepares to expand into Rwanda and Zambia.
In this feature, JOHN ADOYI tells the story of an Ethiopian nurse who stopped waiting for healthcare infrastructure to arrive—and built it herself. In healthcare, every minute can make a difference. Beamlak Alemayehu, a trained nurse and social worker, saw this firsthand during seven months working in the emergency department of an Ethiopian government hospital in 2020. Patients could spend hours searching for the medication, diagnostic tests, or specialist care they needed.
She watched patients move between hospitals and pharmacies, often losing three or four hours trying to find prescribed medication. Others waited days to find the right specialist. Meanwhile, doctors waited for medication or test results they needed to make decisions about their patients. Some patients