About this site
At the Intersection is where healthcare meets technology, regulation meets advocacy, and systems thinking meets real-world impact.
This publication exists because the most important conversations in health and tech don't happen in silos. They happen at the edges, where disciplines collide, overlap, and reshape each other. Policy decisions ripple into patient outcomes. A regulatory shift can make or break a product launch. A piece of technology designed without local context can do more harm than good.
I started this site because I've spent years watching these collisions up close, helping healthcare businesses register products, navigate regulators, and enter African markets. The gaps I kept seeing were too important to leave undocumented: between what research promises and what patients receive, between what regulators intend and what markets deliver, between the headlines about breakthroughs and the quiet, complicated reality of getting solutions to the people who need them most. Many of these gaps are widest in Africa, where fast-growing markets, evolving regulatory landscapes, and urgent health needs collide with infrastructure challenges and a global innovation pipeline that too often treats the continent as an afterthought.
What You'll Find Here
Healthcare & Public Health
From the structural barriers that shape health outcomes to the innovations trying to dismantle them. I write with a particular focus on African health systems: how they function, where they fail, and what it actually takes to deliver care at scale across the continent. Mental health advocacy, the distance between medical research and the communities it's meant to serve, and the politics of whose health gets prioritised are recurring themes.
Market Access & Health Equity
A treatment that exists but can't reach the people who need it isn't really a solution. I explore the mechanics of market access (pricing, distribution, regulatory approval pathways, supply chain realities), especially across African markets where the gap between innovation and availability is often measured in years or decades. This is what I do daily at Infinity Health Africa, and what drove me to build Onboard: a platform that helps businesses understand and navigate the regulatory landscape so products can actually reach patients. I write about what I see from the inside: how global pharmaceutical and health-tech companies enter (or ignore) African markets, why regulatory opacity costs lives, and what local actors are building in the meantime.
Technology & RegTech
The tools, platforms, and systems reshaping how healthcare is delivered, regulated, and accessed. Not the hype cycle version, but the version where implementation meets reality. As someone building regulatory technology for African healthcare markets, I write about what it takes to create tools that work within, not against, the systems they're designed to improve.
Policy & Regulation
How laws, frameworks, and institutional decisions create the conditions for change, or stand in the way. I write about the mechanics of policy as much as its consequences, drawing on direct experience engaging regulators like NAFDAC and their counterparts across the continent. I'm interested in how African regulatory bodies are shaping their own paths on drug approval, medical device registration, data governance, digital health standards, and cross-border health cooperation, and what it's actually like to work with these institutions on the ground.
Advocacy & Systems Thinking
The connective tissue. How do we move from identifying problems to building coalitions that solve them? How do we hold institutions accountable while working within them?
Why "At the Intersection"?
Because the most interesting problems, and the most promising solutions, live between categories. A mental health crisis in Lagos isn't just a clinical issue; it's a policy failure, a cultural conversation, a technology gap, and an advocacy challenge all at once. A vaccine that clears trials in Europe but takes five years to reach West African markets isn't just a supply chain problem. It's a regulatory question, an economic calculation, and a moral one. Writing about any one of those dimensions in isolation misses the point.
This site is my attempt to hold multiple lenses at the same time.
Who Writes This?
I'm Irene Nwaukwa, Founder and CEO of Infinity Health Africa, a regulatory technology company, and the creator of Onboard, a regulatory compliance platform helping healthcare and life sciences businesses navigate the African regulatory landscape.
I've spent over 15 years on the commercial and regulatory sides of healthcare, working across nearly every English- and Portuguese-speaking country in sub-Saharan Africa. These experiences gave me a front-row seat to how market access barriers, regulatory opacity, and infrastructure gaps determine who gets access to care and who doesn't.
My work is informed by the belief that good systems thinking is a form of advocacy, that market access is a health equity issue, and that the people closest to a problem usually understand it best. I write for practitioners, builders, policymakers, and anyone who's ever wanted to understand the systems and practices that define African healthcare.
A Note on Approach
Everything published here is researched with care. I cite sources, question narratives, and try to be honest about what I don't know. I'm not interested in hot takes. I'm interested in the kind of slow, layered understanding that actually moves things forward.
If something here resonates, challenges you, or sparks a question, I'd love to hear from you.
Welcome to the intersection.