A US-based social investment firm, Oxygen Hub is building 100 medical oxygen producing plants in Africa and one of the three earmarked for Nigeria will open on Tuesday, July 13, in Nasarawa State.
The mission of Oxygen Hub which is supported by a number of leading the Rockefeller foundation, MIT is to close the massive medical oxygen gap in the continent and help boost survival of patients whose vulnerability has been made even more manifest during the current pandemic.
Each of the oxygen manufacturing plant cost upwards of $120,000 and the model is to build the plant under an innovative franchising partnership which will allow franchisees to pay back with ten years or more.
According to Efeson Hailemichael, an Ethiopian America who is the CEO of Oxygen Hub, the Nasarawa plant being commissioned on July 13 will be positioned to supply badly needed medical oxygen to hospitals and health centres in central Nigeria, including Abuja, the nation’s capital.
Hailemichael told BusinessDay that his company is using transformative technologies to bring affordable life-saving tools to Africa where up to 90 percent of the medical oxygen need has remained unmet for decades.
According to him, two other plants are also being commissioned in Kenya and Ethiopia.
Noha El-Ghobashy, an Egyptian American lady who is CEO of Institute of Transformative Technologies, the firm’s backers, said apart from arranging financing and building of the medical oxygen plants, Oxygen Hub will also provide prompt maintenance and breakthrough but affordable technologies to ensure that the plants run with little or no idle time to meet the desperate needs of hospital in Africa.
According to her, “our business model is to create sustainable businesses that support Africans to solve Africa’s problems.” She said through a decentralised strategy, Oxygen Hub is working to get oxygen to wherever it is needed on the continent.
Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has historically suffered from an acute shortage of medical oxygen. Most countries in SSA have less than 10 percent of the volume needed to treat high-burden conditions like pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and neonatal respiratory syndrome. COVID-19 has both exacerbated and highlighted this oxygen supply gap.
Over the years, the most common method of supply in SSA has been in the form of cylinders filled with oxygen gas from cryogenic distillation plants that produce liquid oxygen1 (LOX). Most of these factories were built decades back to serve industrial applications—particularly extractives.
To date, they continue to focus heavily on those applications and have served only a fraction of the existing need for medical applications.
More recently, smaller pressure swing adsorption (PSA) 2 plants have emerged as an alternative to cryogenic plants.
However, these systems have often not been adequately maintained, and a sizable portion of them are not currently operational. Unsurprisingly, the existing medical oxygen capacity in SSA has been insufficient to meet the surge needed for COVID-19.
COVID has increased awareness about the importance of oxygen and has generated strong interest from governments, funders, and other influential stakeholders to significantly and sustainably increase access, including to rural areas.
