The Nigerian Entrepreneur saving lives by making healthy Blood readily available across Africa
Who is Temie Giwa-Tubosun?
Temie Giwa-Tubosun is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of LifeBank, a platform that makes blood available when and where it is needed in Nigeria and across Africa to save lives.
Temie Giwa-Tubosun is a Nigerian-American health manager and Founder of LifeBank (formerly One Percent Project), a business enterprise headquartered in Nigeria working to improve access to blood transfusions within the country and across the African continent.
Temie was born in Ila Orangun in Osun State, Nigeria to a university professor and a school teacher. She is the fourth of six children. Her name “Temie” came from the abridging of “Temitope”, one of her Nigerian birth names.
She grew up in Ila, Ilesha, and in Ibadan (a major town in Nigeria) until she was fifteen years old. At the age of ten, her parents won the US Diversity Immigrant Visa and left for the United States with the three older siblings and so in year 2001 when she tuned fifteen, she left to join them with her two younger siblings.
Temie attended Osseo Senior High School, Minnesota, and graduated in 2003. She then attended the Minnesota State University Moorhead and graduated in 2007. In 2008, she went to Graduate school at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey from where she graduated in July 2010.
In 2009, after her first year in graduate school, she returned to Nigeria for the first time since 2001 to intern for Department for International Development at Paths2 in Abuja, Nigeria. The internship lasted three months during which she had an encounter with a poor mother called Aisha whose protracted labour convinced Giwa of the problem of maternal mortality among Nigerians.
In January 2010, she went for a graduate fellowship at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, which lasted until July of that year when she graduated Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. Temie worked briefly at Fairview Health Services in Minnesota in 2010.
In August 2011, she began a fellowship with the Global Health Corps, and spent the next year at Mbarara, a town in Uganda, working with the Millennium Villages Project a project of the United Nations Development Programme and Millennium Promise.
Her Return to Nigeria
In August 2012, Temie returned to Nigeria and in September that same year, she got married at the University of Ibadan.
From February 2012 to October 2013, under the pen name “Temie Giwa”, she wrote a weekly column on ‘YNaija’, a Nigerian youth-focused web magazine on the many issues facing the country. The column was titled “What Works”.
And from 2013 to 2014, Temie worked with the Lagos State Office of Facility Management whose work included upgrading schools, monuments, hospitals, and other facilities managed by the State.
From June 2014 to October 2015, Temie was Program Manager for Nollywood Workshops, an NGO set up by the Hollywood, Health & Society, and described as “a hub for filmmakers in Lagos, Nigeria that supports and delivers movie production and distribution, training, and research.” In her role as Program Manager in August 2014, during the Ebola scare in Nigeria, Temie helped supervise the production of Public Service Announcements created by the organization in collaboration with Nollywood filmmakers, to better enlighten Nigerians about healthy ways to avoid being victims of Ebola.
The ‘One Percent Project’
In 2012, Temie founded a non-governmental organisation called “One Percent Blood Donation Enlightenment Foundation” or ‘One Percent Project’ with the aim of ending blood shortage, educating people on the importance of blood donation for anyone in need of blood, to overcome fears, prejudice, myths and apathy of people on blood donation, and to increase an efficient distribution network of blood in blood banks in Nigeria.
The Birth of LifeBank
In January 2016, Temie founded LifeBank, a business organisation set up to tackle the problem of blood shortage in Nigeria. LifeBank is a medical distribution company that uses data and technology to discover and deliver essential medical products to hospitals in Nigeria. The founding was inspired by the birth of her first child and the complications from that experience. The technology and logistics company is headquartered in Lagos, and incubated at Co-Creation Hub in Yaba, Lagos (Nigeria).
As at January 2017, the company has helped deliver over 2000 pints of blood to patients across the state, country and parts of Africa.
In 2016, Temie met with Mark Zuckerberg (Founder of Facebook) during his first visit to Nigeria. She was one of the two women Zuckerberg referenced in his town hall meeting the next day. Of her work, Mark Zuckerberg had said, “If everyone had the opportunity to build something like this, then the world would be a better place… I’ve been to a lot of different cities… people around the world are trying to build stuff like that. If she actually pulls it off, then she’d show a model that will impact not just Lagos, not just Nigeria, but countries all around the world.” In the meeting, Temie said to Quartz, “Mark’s visit is validation for years of work and everything we’re trying to do.”
In the past four years, Lifebank has distributed about 26,000 products to more than 10,000 patients in nearly 700 hospitals in Nigeria; Temie Giwa-Tubosun’s effort (Lifebank) is now celebrated at home and abroad as an epitome of social entrepreneurship—using business to solve a major society’s problem.
LifeBank is a health-tech and logistics company that uses smart technology and data to deliver essential medical supplies—such as blood, oxygen, and vaccines—to hospitals and healthcare facilities. Founded by Temie Giwa-Tubosun, it exists to ensure no one dies from a lack of access to critical medical resources.
Lifebank Connects blood banks to donors and enables on-demand delivery of blood products and high-purity oxygen. They serve as a medical consumable stock-bank providing 24/7 access to high-quality medical supplies, sourced from trusted distributors.
Headquartered in Nigeria, LifeBank operates across multiple African countries, including Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Sierra Leone, ensuring supply reaches both urban and hard-to-reach communities.
LifeBank has been celebrated globally for its work in maternal mortality and emergency medical response, earning features by organizations like the World Economic Forum and the CNN for powering donations and using smart logistics to save lives
Temie’s Achievements and Honours
In 2014 Temie Giwa-Tubosun was listed as one of the BBC 100 Women. She was the third Nigerian on the list, along with veteran broadcaster Funmi Iyanda and Obiageli Ezekwesili, Nigeria’s former minister of education. She was also the youngest on the list. She was described in the selection as someone “to take notice of now [and] in the future”, making a difference around the world by the BBC.
In 2016, she was invited to give a talk at the London-based TEDxEuston Salon event. Her talk was titled “Healthcare is a Right”.
In March 2017, Temie Giwa-Tubosun was named as one of the 100 Most Inspiring Women in Nigeria for 2017.
In May 2017, she was selected as part of “six entrepreneurs who demonstrate the positive role women are playing in creating opportunities and preparing the region for the Fourth Industrial Revolution” by the World Economic Forum on Africa.
Temie Giwa-Tubosun has been listed in the annual Quartz African Innovators List of “more than 30 Africans” who are “taking leadership and control in a wide range of fields including finance, healthcare, education, agriculture, design and many other fields.”
In November 2019, Temie was named the winner of Jack Ma’s Africa Netpreneur Prize which held in Accra, Ghana. The win for LifeBank was worth $250,000. The Prize got applications from more than 10,000 startups from 50 of Africa’s 54 countries.
In December 2020, Temie was awarded the Global Citizen Prize for Business Leader, for her work in addressing blood shortages in Nigeria, and LifeBank’s work during the COVID-19 pandemic.
And in March 2023, Temie Giwa-Tubosun was named among the “15 African Female Founders You Should Know In 2023” by African Folder.
Temie lives in Lagos with her husband, Kola Tubosun who is a writer and linguist, and their son.
See more about the amazing works that Lifebank is doing at www.lifebankcares.com
