Toyin Ajayi grew up in Nairobi watching her father work. He was a general physician navigating the AIDS epidemic in East Africa, a period defined by overwhelming need and inadequate resources, and she would follow him to the hospital he supervised and watch what he did there. What she absorbed was not simply the science of medicine. It was something about systems. Who got care and who did not. Who the system was designed to serve and who it had simply decided to leave behind.
Her parents were deliberate about it. They raised Ajayi and her two younger sisters to understand that their own economic security and good health came with a responsibility to help others less fortunate. When she was in her late teens, they took her to volunteer at an organisation that served women dying of AIDS. She saw the disease take people who looked like her. She remembers, decades later, the precise moment she watched a news segment debating whether it was cost-effective to send antiretroviral treatments to people in Africa. I just remember feeling so angered and indignant and determined that that was not the way that we as a society should think about the allocation of resources, she said.
She channelled that anger into medicine. And medicine, eventually, led her to build a company that has raised 891.3 million to deliver healthcare to the people the American system has historically decided are too poor, too sick and too complicated to bother with properly.
