If you had asked a younger Temi Marcella if she would spend years of her life running a hospital in Lagos, she would have told you there was no way. “My father is a doctor, and so he had this dream that we would all go into medicine, and we deliberately, me and my two siblings, all went in the opposite direction, one to finance, one to engineering, and one into tech,” she said. But in 2015, Marcella found herself doing just that.
Marcella is the sibling that went into finance. Her impressive career started at Goldman Sachs in London. She then attended Stanford for her MBA. In this time of exploration, Marcella discovered her professional passion. She developed a thesis that she could “leverage finance and capitalism and create the right incentives to create positive impact at scale.” She wanted to spend her career proving it out. She moved to Dubai to work in Emerging Markets focused Private Equity, then back to London, and eventually back to Lagos and the job she never imagined for herself.
“I remember when I was asked to lead the healthcare effort in Nigeria, I pushed back. ‘Absolutely not’. I don’t like hospitals. I don’t like blood,” recalls Marcella. A visit to a public hospital changed everything. Even though she was born in Nigeria, she had never been to a public hospital. During her visit she found unsanitary conditions. She found a hospital that lacked electricity. She met the family of a patient who died because they could not afford the emergency treatment they needed.
Her experience aligns with the reality of the healthcare system in Nigeria. According to the National Primary Healthcare Development Agency, as of 2022 only 43% of Nigerians have access to primary healthcare services. The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported a severe shortage of healthcare workers in Nigeria, with only 4 doctors per 10,000 people, far below the WHO recommendation of 23 doctors per 10,000 people for optimal healthcare delivery. The outcomes of these statistics are dire. Nigeria has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world, estimated at about 800 deaths per 100,000 live births. Marcella realized that she was being presented with an opportunity to prove out her thesis. She accepted the challenge.
The path to building Evercare Hospital Lekki was not easy. At first, the stakeholders Marcella thought would be the most energized to want to propel it were the naysayers. “You can’t build this kind of hospital in Nigeria,” Marcella recalls them saying. When the building was finally erected, people could not believe it. Marcella knew that she had just completed the easy part, “Now we have to run it. Now we have to build a culture that people buy into. They have to see a vision of healthcare that doesn’t exist in this market,” said Marcella.
It’s not just about having a sanitary environment with enough doctors and stable electricity. These are table stakes. One of the more revolutionary interventions that Marcella initiated was implementing patient-centric healthcare. With the patient at the center, everyone who interfaces with the patient is considered just as important as everyone else, from a lab technician to a doctor. “Tactically and pragmatically, it removed the traditional hierarchy that you see in hospital ecosystems where it’s the doctor and no one questions the doctor. Suddenly a nurse could question a doctor and a lab technician could question a nurse, and we could then engage in real conversations about how we really wanted to transform the patient care journey for the better,” shared Marcella.
Realizing that vision could be one solution to the medical brain drain that Nigeria faces. Marcella shared that there are more Nigerian doctors practicing outside of Nigeria than inside it. Considering that half of the 72,000 doctors registered with the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria practice outside of the country, she’s likely correct. “What this hospital has done is create an environment and infrastructure and provide the equipment and increasingly, the standards, that you would see anywhere in the world. We’re actively now having dialog around bringing those physicians back to practice in the country. We’re trying to reverse some of that brain drain in the medical sector,” shared Marcella.
Healthcare is a space where both social and financial goals are realizable. One of the key aspects to making this project successful was that it was financed by a mix of commercial capital with more mission aligned capital, such as capital from the Gates Foundation. The hospital opened in 2021 and is already positively impacting lives and doing well commercially. Its success has also mobilized additional capital into healthcare.
Marcella has since stepped down as the Founding Executive Director of Evercare Hospital Lekki, although she still serves as the Board Director. She’s now the Founding Partner at Alcent Capital which “invests catalytic growth capital into the next generation of leading technology companies with global ambitions, unlocking the vast potential of Africa’s entrepreneurial talent.” In this role, she’s still investing in Healthcare but also in Financial Services, Enterprise, and Blockchain. She’s also raising two daughters who are a big source of motivation; “I want [them] to grow up in a world where they see women as absolutely capable of achieving anything they want and are uninhibited in living their lives to their fullest potential.” While she’s the first to admit that her impact is just a drop in the ocean of what’s needed to fix healthcare, everything Marcella has already achieved in her career can serve as an example that women truly are capable of achieving anything.