Hello, and welcome to the So What podcast, in
which political economic analyst J .P. Landman
discusses the issues uppermost in the minds of
South Africans. You can find a written version
of this content on J .P.'s website, jplandman
.co .za. I am Ruda Landman, and I am your host.
Hello and welcome to this edition of the So What
podcast, which accompanies JP's newsletter dated
the 4th of February 2026 and titled A Story of
African Innovation. JP, this is a bit of a different
format. It is more of a report than what you
usually write. Yes, absolutely. It's basically
the story of a young entrepreneur from Pretoria.
But it is such a good story that I thought I
wanted to share it with readers. But also, secondly,
because sadly, no South African media that I've
seen reported on this story, and I thought it
would be a useful thing to share. Where did you
come across it? I came across it in the South
China Morning Post, which is one of the newspapers
that I read every day. And they carried a report
in December, just before Christmas, of a function
in Kigali in Rwanda, the African Business Heroes
function, where people from all over Africa...
were selected for the most innovative business
ideas. And a young, as I said, entrepreneur from
Pretoria, Adrian Krier, got the third prize of
$150 ,000, which is about 2 .1 million rand.
How many entries and how did Adrian Krier do?
There were 32 ,000 entries from all over Africa.
This is the seventh year. that the African Business
Heroes competition is run. It is run by the Jack
Ma Foundation and Alibaba Philanthropy. Now,
readers will know that Jack Ma is the former
schoolteacher who started the internet giant
company Alibaba, now one of the biggest internet
companies in the world. And they organized this
competition, the African Business Heroes competition.
And as I've said, it's in its seventh year. You
ask how many people entered, 32 ,000 from all
over Africa. The competition is very, very stiff.
And you go through various interviews and rounds.
And in the end, for the people in the final rounds,
they go down and they do a due diligence on the
company, right down to whether your tax affairs
in your country are in order. So it's really
a tough competition. And Adrian Krier, as I've
said, got the third prize, $150 ,000. about 2
.1, 2 .2 million rand tax -free, which is a huge
amount of money. For a small business, definitely.
How did he, his company's called what? Nouveau
Tech, huh? With a Q at the end. How did it start?
What was the problem they wanted to solve? It's
a very interesting story. They started in 2014,
12 years ago. He was a software specialist at
Oracle and he resigned from his job together
with his close friend, Abraham van Wyk. who used
to be a medical practitioner. They both resigned
their jobs and they started this company, NovoTech.
Now, to understand what the company does, we've
got to stand back a little bit. A little bit
of background is necessary. Africa carries about
18 % of the world's population, but it has about
roughly 25 % of the global disease burden. Yet
it only attracts about 3 % of global clinical
research funding. So 80 % of the population,
1 .8, 25 % of the disease burden, but only 3
% of clinical trials. In other words, of every
10 ,000 clinical trial projects that are run
worldwide every year, only about 300 are run
in Africa. Now, this is most regrettable from
two points of view. The one is it's a small participation
by Africa in global medicine and global clinical
trials. But secondly, Africa has got the unique
advantage of a very wide genetic diversity pool.
If you test a medicine here and it works, the
chances are very good that it will work all over
the world. China, Western Europe, North America,
India. On the other hand, if you test the medicine
in Scandinavia, for example, you don't know how
people in China or in Latin America will metabolize
that medicine. And it's very different. Now,
more and more international biomedical companies
realize this and they want to test or they want
to run clinical tests here in Africa. Now, in
Europe and in North America, Clinical trials
are conducted digitally. Everything is done on
computer, not the internet. In Africa, virtually
all of it is done manually on paper. And there
are several problems. You can imagine the stack
of forms that you have to fill in. You can imagine
the errors that creep in. You can imagine the
time that it takes. So if you can digitize clinical
trials or the running of clinical trials in Africa
and get the process up to the standard of North
America or Western Europe, it's really a huge
step forward. And that is where they saw the
gap. Plus, linked to that, the fact that Your
big software companies are all based in Europe
and North America. They're not based in Africa.
So they thought as two Africans that they can
step into this void and turn it into a business
opportunity. And that is exactly what happened.
Is it difficult to get into this field? It seems
that software companies are a dime a dozen. Absolutely.
Yes, it is difficult because you can't just write
an app. to test medicine or to run a clinical
trial. You have to meet the standards of the
United States Federal Drug Administration and
the European Medicines Council. They've got onerous
standards and you've got to meet those standards.
So the medical field is, what's the word, sui
generis. It's something on its own. Something
on its own, highly, highly regulated. And there
is no room for mistakes, obviously, because it
affects people's lives. In addition to that,
what you find with the big pharmaceutical companies,
they're very risk -averse. So they'll much rather
run a trial in Canada or in Scandinavia than
what they run it in Africa. Now, what the Novatec
platforms do is they digitize the trial processes
from end to end. And that is data capture of
the people who are tested, validation, audit
trails, compliance, and advanced analytics afterwards.
It's clinical research today. It's clinical software.
Processes are being used by universities, hospitals,
research organizations, and pharmaceutical companies
worldwide. Well, it seems to me that trust is
the key. How did they build that? Absolutely.
As Adrian Krieger himself says, you know, nobody
would trust software that comes from two young
guys in Pretoria. So they had to work hard at
it. They started off with the help of an old
university professor of his, Professor Koppel,
who encouraged them and got them started on the
road. But he admits that in the beginning they
made many mistakes. They took shortcuts. They
hired too cheaply. The software they developed
was not good enough. And they had to rethink
their game plan. which they did. They raised
the rebuild properly. They raised money internationally
from respected figures in global clinical research.
They hired top -tier talent. What does top -tier
talent mean? It means software engineers, medical
doctors, statisticians, actuaries, and PhDs.
Today they employ 70 highly qualified people
all over the world, 35 in Gauteng, 10 in Cape
Town, and the rest spread out in India, Brazil,
Europe, and Kenya. So it's a big operation. And
as Kriya says, the biggest factor that let him
lie awake at night is that every month he's got
to pay these highly qualified people 60 of them
salaries. So the more than 2 million Rand prize
money will come in very handy. Was there a breakthrough
moment for them? Indeed, the breakthrough moment
came with COVID -19. And what happened was a
company from India. that they were in partnership
with, contacted them and selected them, Nuvotec
and Pretoria, to run a global clinical trial
for COVID medicine. The trial was run across
more than 50 hospitals and thousands of patients.
And those results were tested and retested by
the big pharmaceutical companies and the drug
administration authorities. The global regulators.
The global regulators. They went through the
results with a fine tooth comb and accepted them.
And that was the moment of breakthrough. That
gave the trust, that gave the credibility. And
the footprint today? Well, the footprint today
is, as I've said, universities, research organizations
worldwide use them, pharmaceutical companies
use them, and they're the only company from Africa
whose processes and products complies fully with
the international regulators, specifically North
American and European regulators. To go back
to what you said in the beginning, what is the
impact of this lack of digitization, apart from
being a hindrance in finding research funding?
But what does it mean in Africa? What it means
in Africa is that patients still pay top prices
for drugs, medicines, which are patented, while
cheaper genetics are available. But the genetics
have not been registered by the different authorities.
So you pay five rand for a diabetes pill that
could cost 50 cents. That is the biggest single
problem in Africa. Why? Because the registration
process is too cumbersome? Absolutely. It's cumbersome.
Remember what I said, it's all paper -based.
So it's a difficult process. For example, it
takes the South African health products regulator
about two months to work through one application
for registration. It's a pack of documents that
has to be submitted to the regulator and they
have to go through it. They can't just skip the
pages. And it takes about two months. So there
are about 50 ,000 applications for generic medicines
sitting with various regulators across the African
continent. If you can clear that 50 ,000 backlog,
it means it's 50 ,000 medicines or drugs which
overnight will become much, much cheaper. And
that will have a huge impact on health in Africa.
So what can NovoTech and their processes do about
this? How can they affect it? Yes, what NovoTech
did is they created a not -for -profit division
called the NovoTech Foundation. And they interact
with these various regulators across Africa,
also with the South African one, and they try
and help them to digitize their processes. The
funding for that comes from international philanthropy,
like the Gates Foundation for one, and the other
one is the European and Developing Countries
Clinical Trials Partnership, EDCTP, a long, long
name. In any case, they pay NovoTech Foundation.
to conduct the research, conduct the development
of programs. And they are being remunerated by
these international philanthropy organizations.
Now, in the case of South Africa, with the South
African Health Products Regulatory Authority,
it's the same story. They still follow very inefficient
paper -based processes. So NovoTech is working
with them. And through one of their subsidiaries
called Sygenic, NovoTech has developed... using
a team of data scientists and pharmacologists,
they are building a solution for the South African
Authority. What is the solution? Well, they took
a large language model from Meta in the US, but
based it in South Africa, in South African service,
so that the information, the data, doesn't leave
the continent. and make sure it's secured and
based here. Because the cloud is not really in
the cloud. It is actually somewhere on the servers.
Exactly. So they hope to go alive with the Health
Products Authority in South Africa within the
course of 2026. Adrian is talking within a couple
of months. What will that do to the registration
of medicines? It will cut the processing time
from, as I said earlier, about two months down
to 45 minutes. It's an extraordinary solution.
Now, those of you who've worked with AI will
know this is precisely how it goes. You can take
a long document of 50, 60 pages, and it gets
summarized for you by AI. Better by some than
by others, but it's being done. So that's what
they're aiming for in South Africa in 2026. That'll
make a huge difference to unlock the registration
of medicines here in South Africa. What fascinates
me about this is that so many of those documents
are handwritten. Very true. So what they had
to do, they had to train this large language
model, not just to read all the documents and
so on, but also to read handwriting. And it is
still a bit of a mystery to me how they do that,
because if you look at most doctors' handwriting.
It is illegible even for a human. It is illegible
even for a human. So how they taught the LLM
to read that, I don't know, but they have. And
yeah, as I said, they hope to go live later this
year. In summary, so what? The first so what
is Kruger's vision is very, very simple. Clinical
research is $100 billion a year industry. And
Africa only received about 3 % of that, $3 billion.
If one can increase that share from 3 % to 5%,
it will make a huge difference to healthcare,
health infrastructure, and health professions
here in Africa. That's the first so what. The
second so what is clinical trials are very interesting
in the sense that once the trial is over, it
leaves behind it a sophisticated infrastructure,
computer systems, knowledge, and so on. And you
train people. You train people in the process
of running the trial. That remains behind. So
it's not just a question of doing the trial.
You do it, but there's a footprint that is left
behind on which you can build. The third one
is I really cannot do better than just to quote
Adrian Creer himself. He says, standing next
to Jack Ma on stage in Rwanda was one of the
most profound moments of my life, not because
of the spotlight, but because it validated something
we believed in for years. Africa doesn't need
charity. It needs systems that works, and we're
building them. On that very uplifting note, thank
you very much, and good luck to Adrian and his
team. Indeed. Thank you for listening to the
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