LivFul: Justice Through Health Innovation
“When will I feel safe? When will things go back to normal? When the curve flattens? When a vaccine is created?”
As the world continues to reel in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and economic fallout, those in the developed world are particularly shaken by this microbial threat and all the uncertainty surrounding it. But in many parts of the globe, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia, these kinds of dangers are normal parts of daily life.
600 million people are infected by an insect-borne disease every year.
malaria — just one of the mosquito-borne disease — kills more than 400,000 people each year.
57% of those deaths are children younger than 5 years old.
As a boy growing up in Nigeria, Hogan Bassey experienced insect-borne diseases as a normal part of life. By the time he was 10 years old, he had contracted malaria several times. It is not surprising that he felt frustrated by the cycle of the disease stealing his childhood days and stealing lives within his community. What is remarkable is that he decided to take action.
“It dawned on me that the 'solutions' we were using weren't working,” Bassey said. “I thought, 'Why can't I have something that would fit into my daily life that I could put on my skin that kept the bugs from biting me?’ And I wondered why someone hadn't invented this yet. Little did I know, halfway around the world insect repellents were ubiquitous.”
Motivated to change his situation, 10-year-old Bassey concocted his own repellent in his family bathtub from simple household products.
Even as a young boy, his interest in medicine and public health continued to grow. One night, he watched a documentary about children suffering from African Trypanosomiasis (“sleeping sickness”), another vector-borne disease, which is found only in rural Africa and can be fatal if left untreated.
“I remember that night, I barged into my mom's room, and I told her I was going to grow up to own this thing called a pharmaceutical company that got medication to the children,” Bassey said. “For the rest of my life, every time I came up with a new idea to save the ozone layer or some other crazy idea, my mom would hold me accountable to that dream.”
It’s a problem of lack of access. It’s a justice issue.
Repellents existed. They just didn't exist in Bassey’s world. And today, that is still the reality for a significant portion of our planet’s population. We have the science and technology to prevent so many insect-borne diseases, and yet, much of the world’s population cannot access these life-saving tools.
Since its invention, insect repellent has been accessible primarily through the formal retail market model, found in the aisles of nearly every grocery store, pharmacy and service station in the Western world. However, the LivFul team explains that this distribution model breaks down because of this reality: Approximately 85 percent of Africa, 65 percent of Asia and 55 percent of Latin America — places where malaria, dengue fever, Zika and other vector-borne diseases remain a widespread threat — operate through an informal market. As a middle class Nigerian boy, Bassey was not able to access a product he needed daily because of availability and price point.
“Within the context of infection and infectious disease, this lack of access costs lives; it costs livelihoods,” said Michael Norman, LivFul CEO. “It's a big part of why poverty persists in some areas and not in others — because of these broken supply chains and this lack of economic opportunity.
Life to the full.
“How are we transforming lives? How are we helping people live free, live well and live to their fullest potential?”
These are the types of questions Bassey asks today as co-founder and chief innovation officer of LivFul, a health innovation company challenging the status quo of the global healthcare industry — starting with an insect repellent.
Founded in 2012, LivFul’s vision is to transform the day-to-day lives of people through health innovations that help everyone, regardless of geography or socio-economic status. They are working to deliver the most effective repellents to more than the 600 million people each year that contract an insect-borne disease and the 3 billion more at risk. Their patented, plant-based technology, STAYTECH, works with repellents to make them skin-friendly and more effective for long periods of time. The repellent is their first product in the market, but others are in active development by their technical team in Liverpool, England.
The lack of access to life-saving insect repellants is a fundamental problem LivFul’s team works daily to resolve. LivFul aims to reach communities largely overlooked by pharmaceutical companies, the children and families who are least profitable and most difficult to reach. Therefore, LivFul’s task is twofold:
Research and develop health innovations, beginning the entire process with the question, “What do you need?”, rather than, “How do we get from you what we want?”
Get the most effective products to the people who need it most by working with governments, international nonprofits, social entrepreneurs, public health academics and investors to create long-term, systemic change within the global health industry.
Simple, right? They know it is not, but they believe their endeavor is worth the risk. Why? Because of a promise and an invitation.
Your kingdom come
They will be called oaks of righteousness,
a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendor …
They will rebuild the ancient ruins
and restore the places long devastated;
they will renew the ruined cities
that have been devastated for generations…
And you will be called priests of the Lord,
you will be named ministers of our God.
You will feed on the wealth of nations,
and in their riches you will boast …
For I, the Lord, love justice;
I hate robbery and wrongdoing.
In my faithfulness I will reward my people
and make an everlasting covenant with them ...
For as the soil makes the sprout come up
and a garden causes seeds to grow,
so the Sovereign Lord will make righteousness
and praise spring up before all nations.
When speaking to the senior leadership team at LivFul, their story continues to circle back to what they call the Isaiah 61 Mandate. In this Old Testament prophecy, Jesus invites his people to be part of a promised season of justice and restoration.
Matt Elsberry, Livful President, explains that while the gospel is made up of four parts: Creation, The Fall, Redemption and Restoration, Western Christian culture has recently focused on the middle two sections, while neglecting the final and arguably the best part of the story. God has invited his people to be part of the last chapter: the story of redemption and renewal.
“When Jesus taught us to pray ‘Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,’ he was saying, ‘Let's make earth make more like heaven’,” Elsberry said. “Not one day when we're taken to heaven, but now.”
LivFul is not labeled a “Christian company.” You will not find Bible verses across their website or product labels, and their staff around the world is made up of those who follow Christ and those who do not. But Bassey, along with his co-founder, Andy Mahler, Norman, Elsberry and the rest of the senior leadership team, maintains a company culture that is built on a calling to be part of restoration in a broken world, to bring justice and shalom, and to invite the world’s most marginalized into that same work and purpose. As the LivFul team pursues their goal, they are keenly aware they are a miniscule storyline in the larger narrative of Kingdom restoration God is writing globally.
Bassey explains their business philosophy:
“How do we look at what’s broken in the world from the viewpoint of God? And how do we partner with him and co-labor to bring the restoration that God envisioned in Isaiah 61? That is part of our whole view and mandate as a company. For us, that manifests itself out in life science. Our purpose as a company is to steward the resources that God has given us from a talent and capital standpoint, but also looking at the wider spectrum of ROI that goes beyond financials, looking at social, environmental and spiritual ROI.”
This is far from a universal viewpoint within the pharmaceutical and healthcare world. Elsberry recently spoke with one of LivFul’s partners after a visit to Uganda, where she learned that the pharmaceutical industry there was not interested in preventing malaria because the nation’s 10.3 million cases each year were highly profitable to treat. 10.3 million customers, who may have to pay from $1.11 to up to $25 USD per incident, create a strong incentive to allow people to get sick.
While darkness is so common, light simultaneously manifests itself through a network of academics, investors, researchers, governments, health companies, private-public health providers — LivFul’s “ecosystem” as they call it — who are willing to be part of systemic change in the global healthcare industry. The LivFul team has found themselves uniquely positioned to facilitate relationships between those entities. They strive to understand the needs of every partner, creating viable working relationships built on trust, not transactions.
Accepting the invitation to an adventure.
After years as a practicing attorney, Norman started down a road that led him to LivFul because of an entrepreneurial spirit and a question God wouldn’t let him let go of:
“HOW DO FAITH AND BUSINESS ALIGN?”
Since beginning his journey with LivFul, Norman has witnessed God steadily expand their team with high caliber professionals and stakeholders who were attracted to LivFul because that same question continued to echo in their minds.
“We've attracted some seriously high quality people because of that desire to be part of something missional, to be aligned in their faith, values and servant nature of their hearts, while also recognizing they’ve been entrusted with great capacity and great experience,” Norman said.
This same missional alignment from their investors has been crucial to their viability as a company, Norman explained. Work within life sciences is highly capital intensive. And LivFul’s goals to create long-term systemic change, simply cannot be met by short-term venture capital investors, who are understandably hoping to see their return in five years. The team continues to trust God for the right people and entities, and he continues to provide.
During his time with Crown Financial Ministries, Elsberry spent extensive time studying the idea of stewardship. From his point of view, if you believe that God owns everything — it changes everything.
“We are just stewards of what he entrusts to us,” said Elsberry. “That thinking led me to want to blur out the line between business and ministry and ask the question: ‘If God owns everything, why does it matter if it's an investment or a donation?’ Your investment should be treated just as holy as your donations to churches.”
The longer Elsberry has studied what scripture has to say about finances, the stranger it has become to see capital shelved as being “agnostic or irrelevant to the Kingdom of God”, other than when it is being donated to a church or charitable institution. Because of this misunderstanding, many believers are only scratching the surface of their potential for impact.
“At LivFul, we see impact investing as an invitation to an adventure,” Elsberry said. “It's an invitation to get off the bench and start actively asking God what impact does the Kingdom require of this capital, this resource that he's given me? And our hope at LivFul is that we create a company worthy of that investment. We invite imperfect people to pursue a mission bigger than themselves in order to serve others by seeking out and liberating innovation for everyone.”
