The Founder
My parents are immigrants. Growing up with a bone tumor no one could diagnose taught me early: without resources, knowledge means nothing.
At 19, working $15 an hour at a flatbread shop, my best friend got very sick and I couldn't afford her healthcare. An unexpected man reached out with life-saving advice on antibiotic stewardship that saved her life and inspired me to devote my life to increasing public access to life-saving information. I promised God I'd devote my life to making healthcare accessible to the people who need it most.
My dad grabbed my shoulder and said: "Your body is a temple for your soul." The most lasting help builds someone's capacity to take care of themselves. That became the foundation of BioKite.
That faith took me to Kenya, where a Maasai community leader named Maison became my co-founder. Every conversation echoed the same diagnosis: solar infrastructure falls into disrepair because maintenance costs weren't properly funded. So we stopped importing solutions. We started building engineers.
I later lost Penelope to inaccessible healthcare, the kind that happens when clinics can't keep the lights on. I promised God: I'll devote my entire life to lifting BioKite to success.
Power isn't optional. It's whether they come home.
Sarah Wang, CEO, BioKite Labs
The Co-Founder
Some of my earliest memories are on a red-dirt road in rural Ghana, walking each week to visit a relative receiving palliative care. Those visits planted something stubborn in me: medicine isn't only about treating disease. It's about showing up when the systems built to help people fail.
She died, not from a lack of medical knowledge, but from a lack of infrastructure that turns knowledge into rescue.
I spent years in rural district hospitals in Ghana, on medical missions across South Sudan, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and South Africa, and in NGO clinics serving the people forgotten twice. What I saw, again and again, was clinical excellence rendered helpless by infrastructure collapse.
One night clarified everything. A young woman came in with obstructed labor. Then the power went out. The solar system had been dead for months. The generator wouldn't start. We delivered in near-total darkness with phone torches and sent her 45 kilometers through the night to the district hospital.
Mother and baby survived. But it was a preventable escalation driven entirely by infrastructure failure. Clinical skill alone cannot overcome systemic infrastructure collapse.
Mike Tuffour Amirikah, MD MPH EMBA, Co-Founder & VP, BioKite Labs
From the Field
The scalpel had already opened her abdomen. A young mother lay unconscious on the operating table in a rural clinic in Nigeria. The incision was made. The anesthesia was running.
Then the power failed.
Transfer her? She was sedated with her abdomen open. Moving her meant unpaved roads in the dark, hoping the anesthesia held, hoping a receiving hospital had a team ready to finish what someone else had started. A lot of people die during that transfer.
This time, a backup generator roared to life. The team completed the cesarean. Mother and baby survived. The margin between that outcome and the other one was the width of a power switch.
Not every night ended that way. Another delivery, another mother, a baby born in severe respiratory distress. Every technique. Every manual method. The baby did not survive.
A mother walked into that clinic carrying a life. She walked out carrying silence. Not because the doctors didn't know what to do. Because the infrastructure had already collapsed before the emergency began.
Backup power isn't a convenience. It's the difference between a first breath and a last one.
Dr. Emmanuel Gayus, MPH, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
