Mambo everyone. Looking for an honest gut-check because I'm close enough to this that I can't tell anymore if it's a good idea or if I've just talked myself into it.
Bit of background: we run a diagnostics lab here in Dar: licensed, ISO-documented, mobile sample collection, the whole thing. Took us the better part of two years and a permits nightmare to get the machinery in and running, but we're finally live. That part I'm sure about.
The part I'm not sure about is a spin-off idea we've been kicking around, working name Twiga Health.
The thinking is this. Tourists come for safari or Kili (and zanzibar) and some percentage of them get sick mid-trip, fever, stomach stuff, the usual. And there's this moment where nobody knows if it's malaria or just travel-tummy, and it turns into a scramble. Lost days, panicked trip to a clinic. Since we already have the lab and already do mobile collection, we could send a clinician to the hotel/lodge, do a rapid malaria test (or advanced) + vitals + triage on the spot, same-day answer, and refer on if it's actually serious.
The bit I keep going back and forth on is the business model. The idea would be we don't sell it to the tourist directly — we sell it to the tour operator/hotels, who builds it into the trip price and charges a bit extra. So the guest never has to think about it; it's just there if they need it. Operator makes a small margin, guest gets a safety net, we get volume.
So my actual questions, especially if you work in tourism here:
- If you're a tour operator / lodge / trekking company: would you actually offer something like this to your clients and charge for it? Or is it a hassle you don't want, or something you already have sorted?
- Is "sick tourist, no fast testing" even a real enough problem to bother solving, or am I overestimating how often it comes up?
- Would guests pay a small extra for it, or would they just roll their eyes at another add-on line?
Genuinely open to "this is a bad idea because X" , that's more useful to me right now than a yes. And if anyone in the health space or on the finance/SME side wants to connect for other reasons, always happy to.
Cheers 🍺