Some seven years ago, Dare Odumade was saddened by the case of a woman who died after taking the wrong anti-malaria drugs in Ghana. That got him thinking.

“That revelation quite piqued my interest and hence began my mission of speaking to consumers and identifying the challenges they faced when identifying products and how counterfeit products have adversely affected them,” he tells Nodo News.

Tech Enthusiasts Seeking to Impact Lives

Teaming up with his friend Oluwatosin Adelowo in 2018, they co-founded a startup to verify the originality and credibility of drugs sole in Nigeria’s chemists and drug stores.

They named it Chekkit Technologies, from the practice of customers of checking and confirming if the medicine they purchase is genuine. The anti-counterfeiting startup that mainly focuses on pharmaceutical products as well as manufacturers and producers of consumer goods (FMCG).

The Chekkit platform helps in the tracking and customer experience analytics platform that helps producers protect their brands, track supply chain activities and collect last-mile consumer insights in real-time.

It is powered by Ethereum blockchain and works in packaged product anti-counterfeiting, and traceability. It is also a consumer insights and intelligence software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.

In 2015, after engaging in a number of music-driven ventures for some years, Chekkit Technologies co-founder and CEO, Odumade who has always been a tech enthusiast, sought to embark on a project that would impact lives.

Counterfeit Drugs are Killing Many Africans

The issue of counterfeit products -including drugs, medication, FMCGs, and numerous other consumer goods- is rampact not just in Nigeria, but also across Africa where the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reports that fake and counterfeit medicines kill up to 500,000 sub-Saharan Africans annually. The menace extends to the global scene where $83 billion worth of counterfeit drugs are sold annually according to the World Health Organization.

In the West African country, only about a quarter of some 500 samples of medicine purchased on the streets for an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study in 1992 were genuine, indicating just how deep-rooted and long-standing the vice is in the country.

A key contributor to the prevalence of counterfeit medicines in Nigeria is the continued presence of a highly unregulated open drug markets across major cities in the country. In this case, these medicines are sold in the open air, on streets, and in kiosks, and stalls.

The East African country of Kenya also hasn’t been left far behind. On its part the country makes revenue losses of more than $786 million annually due to the proliferation of counterfeit products, according to a study conducted in 2020 by the country’s anti-counterfeit authority.

Other than consumer goods and medications, Kenya has for ages been embroiled in a fight to control the trade of counterfeit farming inputs, with the Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Service (KEPHIS) rolling out measures to control the menace.

While there have been efforts – especially by tech-based startups- to address the issue in Nigeria, where the prevalence rate of the fake drug menace is higher than the global average of 10%, and also among numerous other African countries, it appears to persist.

Chekkit Wants to Root out Fake Medicines

That is why in 2015, after engaging in a number of music-driven ventures for some years, Chekkit Technologies co-founder and CEO, Odumade embarked on a project that would impact lives by addressing the issue of counterfeits.

Adelowo, who is the CMO and co-founder of Chekkit explains that in 2017 and 2018, though the duo operated from different localities, they sought to have a project that would address the issue of the spread of counterfeit drugs. They first met in 2014, while working on different projects.

Adelowo had previously worked in fintech where he had been the lead in several growth campaigns and digitization projects before co-founding Chekkit Inc. He however quit his fulltime job in 2019, and the duo focused fully on the mission of rooting out fake medicines from Africa’s drug stores.

Odumade, who describes himself as an internetpreneur, says many people continue to lose their lives to counterfeit products. And the vast majority of these fatalities can be traced to poor communities proliferated with medicine dealers who circumvent regulations.

Such are the cases that Chekkit strives to address. This is also one of the reasons why Chekkit is the only company in Nigeria recognized for both serialization and traceability.

Traceability and serialization are the key components in a successful pharmaceutical supply chain. And these processes have traditionally been managed through centralized systems and databases, which are more often than not, controlled by individual companies or third-party organizations.

Centralized vs. Decentralized System for Supply Chain

Such centralized systems are always susceptible to cyber attacks and can be exposed to hacking, data breaching, errors, or sometimes the data they contain may be siloed and inaccessible to other supply chain partners.

These factors sometimes make it difficult to gain a complete and accurate view of the supply chain. They can also lead to inefficiencies.

This factor makes blockchain technology a more suitable option for adoption. Blockchain technology is decentralized and distributed. The information stored using this technology is kept in a network of computers, rather than in a single centralized location.

In this way, Chekkit, powered by blockchain, is able to guarantee the traceability and hence the safety of the products that consumers use. “In the next five years, we are hopeful that with this system, we can have a market in Nigeria -and later across Africa and beyond- that is devoid of counterfeits,” says Odumade. “We have so far worked with over 30 brands some which are consumer products manufacturers while others are pharmaceuticals.”

The duo now indicate that Chekkit’s goal is to be the leading traceability, anti-counterfeit and consumer intelligence platform in the Africa region, and by extension the entire Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

From MENA to Ethiopia, Kenya and Ghana

“We already have projects ongoing outside Nigeria. We’ve gotten to Pakistan and Afghanistan. We are looking at the Ethiopian market, and other African countries like Kenya and Ghana. Much of our expansion is driven by demand from the local ecosystem,” Odumade says.

Web3, which encompasses technologies like token-driven economy, decentralization, and blockchain, among others, has been quite befitting in addressing the challenge of counterfeit drug trade, and others that affect Africa’s economies, according to Adelowo. In addressing the issue of counterfeit medicines and goods, Web3 comes handy in the interoperability of the supply chain, moreso in the pharmaceutical space.

“One of the major reasons for deploying blockchain technology is for securing and storage of data. In the pharmaceutical sector, for traceability and serialization to work effectively, this data has to be shared as soon as it is needed, and accurately to all the players in the supply chain,” says Adelowo.

Transfer and transmitting of this data, its storage, and securing, are all processes that can be greatly improved through Web3. The transparency, immutability, its decentralized nature and seamless transfer of data when required are all attributes that blockchain brings to the supply chain.

“It becomes a lot easier for the government and the entire supply chain players to trace, secure and manage this supply chain and ensure that its operations are traceable and transparent,” Odumade says.

Though the proliferation of counterfeit drugs and medical supplies continues to bedevil Africa, if harnessed comprehensively, blockchain technology could be effective in addressing the challenge, and in turn, save lives and money.