What Women Already Knew About Telehealth
and what the rest of the world is only now beginning to understand.
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Telehealth is often framed as a Western convenience, an efficiency upgrade for health systems already built to function. But if you look beyond high-income countries, another reality becomes impossible to ignore. In much of the Middle East and Africa, telehealth is not a feature of the healthcare system. It is fast becoming the system itself.
According to the World Health Organization’s analysis of digital health readiness, many low- and middle-income countries have adopted eHealth and telemedicine as formal components of their universal-health-coverage strategies. Out of necessity, not optimism - might I add. Health-workforce shortages, vast geographic distances, and inconsistent clinic staffing have made digital care one of the only scalable access points.
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A Small Funding Round That Signals a Massive Shift
This is why a relatively small headline caught my attention two weeks ago: Nabta Health raised $2 million to expand its hybrid women’s-health platform across the Middle East and Africa.
In Silicon Valley, USD $2 million barely registers. But, in this context, it signals a structural shift: a region preparing to leapfrog the clinic-centered model that has never fully served women.
The Hybrid Model Built for Places Where Infrastructure Never Arrived
Nabta’s model is deceptively simple. A symptom logged on a phone. AI-supported triage. A consultation delivered virtually or, when needed, in person. At-home diagnostics. Local clinical partners instead of centralized infrastructure.
This is a care architecture built for places where the system itself has always been fragmented as opposed to “telehealth layered onto an existing system”.
What Women Actually Do When the System Doesn’t Work
Across much of sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, and the Gulf, women don’t “access the healthcare system” so much as improvise around the parts of it that exist. Studies in Kenya and Nigeria show that pharmacies often serve as the first point of care in urban and peri-urban communities.
If you want to know how women actually get care, you don’t look at glossy policy documents. You look at WhatsApp chats at 11 p.m., at the pharmacist who somehow knows everyone’s medications by heart, or at the auntie who has become a one-woman triage line because she once worked in a clinic twenty years ago.
These are not exceptions; they are the operating reality of women’s health in regions where clinics are unevenly distributed and where female clinicians are scarce; a phenomenon documented repeatedly in UNFPA’s assessments of reproductive-health access across MENA and Africa.
Consider what this looks like in practice:
A hypertensive woman in rural Kenya who once lost an entire day walking to a clinic that might not be staffed now completes her follow-ups by phone and collects her medication at a nearby pharmacy.
A woman in Lagos transmits her blood-pressure readings via WhatsApp to a remote nurse instead of waiting months for an in-person review.
A woman in Riyadh logs her symptoms privately from a stairwell, a car, or her kitchen because clinic spaces do not always guarantee confidentiality.
When you lay all these stories next to each other, you realise something obvious: women have already been doing telehealth for years. Just without the “telehealth” part. Without the platforms or billing codes or clinical governance frameworks. Without any of the language we like to tack on when we want to make something sound official.
What they’ve been doing is far simpler: trying to solve a problem in the moment using whatever connection they can find, human or digital.
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The Digital Foundations That Were Already in Place
These examples reflect a simple structural truth: care pathways for women in these regions have never been linear.
Meanwhile, the digital infrastructure required for telehealth to scale is already in place. Smartphone penetration in MENA exceeds 85%, and mobile-internet adoption in Africa is rising rapidly according to GSMA’s Mobile Economy reports and data costs have fallen dramatically across much of sub-Saharan Africa.
Put all of this together and the implications become clear. You have:
millions of women spread across geographies where the “formal” health system is more aspiration than reality
digital habits that are already deeply ingrained
and informal care networks that have existed forever
Telehealth in this context is not an optimization. It is an infrastructural correction. It’s the missing layer, the thing that finally connects all the pieces women have been holding together on their own.
Telehealth Here Isn’t Innovation. It’s Correction.
Western debates around telehealth revolve around reimbursement models, clinical governance, or safety protocols. Important concerns no doubt, but ones that presuppose a functioning system. Much of the world does not have that luxury.
For many communities, the question is not how telehealth can enhance existing care; it is whether telehealth can create the first reliable point of care at all.
Why a $2M Raise Matters More Here Than a $200M Round Elsewhere
Nabta’s $2 million raise is small, but the shift it represents is not. It signals a future in which women’s-health innovation does not radiate from traditional global hubs, but emerges from regions where necessity has outpaced policy for decades, and where women have never had the option of waiting for the system to evolve on its own.
Telehealth in these regions is not convenience. It is repair. And repair, when scaled, becomes transformation.
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This essay is part of my ongoing series on the billion-dollar blind spot in women’s health, wealth, and capital. You can subscribe to receive new essays every Sunday and join the conversation shaping the future of investing
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Disclaimer & Disclosure
This content is for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute financial, investment, legal, or medical advice, or an offer to buy or sell any securities. Opinions expressed are those of the author and may not reflect the views of affiliated organisations. Readers should seek professional advice tailored to their individual circumstances before making investment decisions. Investing involves risk, including potential loss of principal. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
If you could redesign telehealth specifically for midlife women, what would you add or remove to make it truly supportive of your health needs right now?