By: Dosunmu Paul 

Access to timely and quality healthcare remains a persistent challenge for students at the University of Ibadan. Students have often complained about long waiting hours before access to doctors, insensitivity of health workers in the University’s clinic, as well as poor delivery of healthcare.

This has often led some students to seek alternative treatments, such as visiting hospitals and purchasing medication from pharmacy stores outside the school.

Recognizing this problem, a group of student innovators, Oloruntoba Ajayi, Samuel Ogunleke and Godson Chukwuemeka launched a telemedicine initiative known as “DOKIA”.

DOKIA was a healthcare start-up that helped healthcare facilities manage inventory and procure medical supplies seamlessly. It was designed to redefine the negative narrative  and students’ experiences with the University’s clinic  by leveraging the platform to improve healthcare access.

According to the Team Lead, the initiative actually gave many students a glimmer of hope in the University’s Healthcare system. Speaking to IndyPress, one of the student innovators explained, “At the time, we put the solution to the test several times and dozens of people (students) saw a proof of concept that could actually scale. So, yeah, we were pretty successful.”

It is worth noting that this initiative emerged  the most outstanding among other initiatives by five other teams that participated in the University of Ibadan Research Development Gen Z Hackathon held on the 5th of November, 2024 and also won the award of being the best innovative idea. In spite of the huge potential of this Initiative to improve healthcare access in the University, it eventually ceased operations.

Providing clarification to the reasons for stopping the initiative, the team lead explained, “We stopped because we realized we were bringing a solution ahead of its time and more importantly, solving a real problem for the wrong audience. Like I said, we are innovators and problem-solvers, not short sighted opportunists or lobbyists. The moment it requires lobbying across different levels just to introduce a solution that clearly provides mutual benefits to all parties involved, we step back.”

“What made it worse was that several aspiring student leaders at the time saw us as nothing more than a tool to pad their manifestos, without even the barest understanding of the problem we were tackling or the solution we had built. If that isn’t opportunism, I don’t know what that is,” he added.

The fall of this valuable initiative, Dokia, brings to the fore some critical lessons to be learnt especially on the need for the University to create safeguards for the protection of such initiative from exploitation and to ensure continuity and maximum impact as it solves a critical problem in healthcare access within the University.

On whether they will be willing to continue the initiative, the Team Lead stated that “if or when the time is right and the people are willing, then they are also ready.”