How LifeBank is solving the problem of blood scarcity — one hospital at a time

LifeBank, a platform/app that makes blood available, has been featured on CNN’s African Start-Up.

Temie Giwa-Tubosun, the founder, and CEO of LifeBank established the platform in 2015 to help reduce blood shortage in Nigeria.

LifeBank provides records of blood banks available all over Lagos, which allows health centers to find the relevant blood types and order for delivery.

The company delivers an average of 300 pints of blood a month to more than 170 hospitals across the state.

“Blood is such an interesting problem. It’s a problem that kills so many people across the continent, across the world. And it’s a problem that we can solve with technology”, Giwa-Tubosun told CNN.

“We like to think of ourselves at LifeBank as a technology and logistics start-up. We use technology to discover blood and deploy this information to hands of our hospital clients.

“Then we deliver the blood they ordered to their hospital within 55 minutes.”

“It’s not a poor people problem, it’s not a rich people problem, it’s everybody’s problem… We like to think that we’ve made the blood donation easy and fun with our app.”

Explaining how the system works, Giwa-Tubosun said: “Let’s say you’re a donor, I register on the platform and I book an appointment, LifeBank finds the closest blood bank to you.

“It books an appointment for you at the blood bank. You go to the blood bank you give blood… We have about 3,000 donors registered on our platform who’ve agreed to give blood to save lives.

“Our goal is to get to one million active donors for our donor app. We also have a goal to get to every hospital, every single hospital within Lagos in the next two years.

“One of the biggest challenges we face when we started LifeBank was the lack of infrastructure.  We needed to build everything.”