Photograph — GIST network

Babymigo, a Nigerian online platform for mothers and pregnant women has been named one of Time Magazine’s 50 Genius Companies for the future. Other African companies on the list include Ghana’s Bitland, a real-estate company that sells land using bitcoins, Kenya’s Ona, a mobile data collection company, South Africa’s Agriprotein, an agriculture company providing new solutions to animal feed with fly larvae, and Kenya’s BRCK, a Kenyan tech company that provides free public Wi-Fi network.

The 50 Genius Companies list was assembled by TIME Magazine’s global network of editors and correspondents. This year’s list is the first ever list from the Magazine, and the criteria for selection into the list include originality, influence, success, and ambition. These 50 companies, according to the TIME Magazine’s staff members, are ‘inventing the future’ and are worth observing for solutions they will provide next.

While there were many well-known organizations like Apple, Disney, Amazon, Nintendo, Nike, Volvo, GW Pharmaceuticals on the list, the presence of lesser-known companies seem to make it more genuine, and well- researched.

Babymigo was founded by Adeloye Olanrewaju in 2017 to provide solutions for mothers and pregnant women, and to help reduce maternal and child mortality on the continent. More than 800 women die from complications due to pregnancy and childbirth every day, with most of that number from Nigeria and other developing countries. Adeloye Olanrewaju, a graduate of Medical Physiology from LAUTECH, and a post-graduate degree from the University of Cambridge created an SMS service that would help pregnant women know about their doctor’s appointments and update them on their babies development. However, with the reaction he received from the SMS service, Olanrewaju realized that there was a need to create a community of pregnant mothers and medical experts.

The Babymigo app was launched in November 2017, already boasts of 90,000 registered users while it has also been downloaded 30,000 times. Olanrewaju told Times Magazine that he knows there is a market for Babymigo’s services, especially in Nigeria. “There are 10.4 million babies born every year in Nigeria, and every one of those mothers is hungry for the kind of information we provide,” he said.

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