It was 2017. Folake Owodunni's young son woke up screaming in the middle of the night. She was in Canada, so she called 911. Within minutes, a trained emergency team was at her door, assessed the situation and handled it. The crisis was over, just like that.

Then she lay awake thinking: what if we had been in Nigeria? That question became a company.

Anyone who has ever navigated the Nigerian medical system or watched someone they love try to, knows exactly how that thought feels.

There is no functional emergency line or guaranteed ambulance. There is no system that kicks into gear when something goes wrong at 2am. What there is, mostly, is panic, prayers and whoever is awake enough to drive.

Folake Owodunni decided that was not good enough. Today, she is the co-founder and CEO of Emergency Response Africa (ERA), arguably one of the most consequential health tech companies on the continent right now.

From Pre-med Student to Health Tech Founder

Folake's journey to building ERA was not exactly a straight one.

She moved from Nigeria to the United States to study pre-med at the University of Oregon, graduated in 2008 with a Biology degree and then spent years moving across continents, accumulating experience in healthcare, non-profit work, management consulting and communications in the US, Nigeria and Canada.

She later earned a Master's in Global Health and Development from University College London, and then a second master's in Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology from the University of Waterloo in Canada.

She is also a certified First Responderwith the Canadian Red Cross which, when you think about what she ended up building, makes complete sense.

Her co-founder, Maame Poku, is Ghanaian and came to the founding of ERA from a different, more devastating angle. She lost a family member who did not receive timely emergency care.

Two women with deep personal encounters with the same system failure. That is how Emergency Response Africa was born.

So, What Exactly Does ERA Do?

Think of ERA as what 911 should be for Nigeria and eventually, for Africa. The company runs a toll-free emergency line that connects callers to trained medical dispatchers who assess the situation and coordinate the nearest available ambulance or first responder.

If a hospital transfer is needed, ERA's command centre contacts verified, emergency-ready hospitals near the scene to confirm availability before dispatching.

And crucially, they follow up.

One of ERA's most innovative solutions is the Motorcycle Medic. This is essentially a paramedic who arrives on a motorbike, fully equipped to treat patients on-site.

In a country where Lagos traffic alone could kill a person waiting for an ambulance, this is a life-saving innovation.

The Motorcycle Medic can reach a patient, stabilise them on the spot and call for further care only if necessary.

It is the kind of local, context-aware problem-solving that separates genuinely African innovation from solutions built overseas and imported with almost no regard for the system.

Since launching in March 2021, ERA has managed over 4,500 emergency incidents across Nigeria. Response times have been cut by as much as 80% in some cases.

The company has secured government partnerships with Edo, Ogun and Rivers states, and currently operates in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt.

Winning on a Global Stage

Recognition has followed the results. ERA has received the Google Black Founders Fund, the JICA Next Innovation with Japan Award, and in 2024, Folake won the Aurora Tech Award, a global prize for women in tech.

She also won it on International Women's Day.

ERA is now planning to invest part of that funding into AI-driven dispatch systems to make emergency responses even faster and more precise.

Why She Matters

We all know how epileptic the emergency system in Nigeria is. People drive themselves to hospitals in the middle of medical crises. Some people arrive and are turned away. Some die in traffic.

These are daily realities. Folake Owodunni looked at that reality and did not accept it.

She is constructing, almost from scratch, the kind of emergency infrastructure that most countries have had for decades, doing it with technology, with government buy-in, with motorcycle medics navigating Third Mainland Bridge at 2am.

She is proof that the solution to Africa's most urgent problems will be built by Africans who know exactly what those problems feel like.

In a continent full of people who are more than capable of solving their own crises, Folake Owodunni is exactly the kind of woman we should be watching.