Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. A day that has become a referendum on consumerism, feminism, devotion, and whatever other -ism we currently use to signal our values. There are enough think pieces on what Valentine’s Day should or shouldn’t be. This isn’t about that.
At its simplest, Valentine’s Day is about love.
And this is a love letter to women who look like me.
Women whose bodies have always been studied, but rarely prioritised.
Women whose biology is labeled “complex” when what it really is, is inconvenient to existing systems.
Women who are told the data don’t exist; as if the absence is innate, not manufactured through decades of disinterest.
Women who look like me are invisible in the global pharmaceutical industry.
I have spent years in rooms where new drugs were debated, medical devices were funded, health futures were mapped. I have listened carefully to conversations about scalability and market fit, risk, operational feasibility, and commercial viability. I have learned the language fluently.
And do you know what has been missing all along?
African women are rarely centred in global pharmaceutical research. Not explicitly excluded. Not openly dismissed. Just consistently positioned at the margins: too operationally complex, too data-poor, too difficult to justify within traditional models.
Here is a truth well understood by women who look like me: we are tired.
Tired of being framed as edge cases in global pharmaceutical research.
Tired of hearing that our markets are too small and too risky to justify serious investment.
Tired of sitting in rooms where innovation is celebrated as world-changing while an entire continents is treated as a sales & marketing afterthought.
This level of invisibility is rarely accidental. It is a pattern. And patterns, once seen clearly, demand a response.
Misala is my response.
I am building Misala because systems reflect priorities. And priorities can be redesigned.
How Misala Operates
Misala operates in the spaces that existing models overlook.
We localise proven innovations and validate them in the contexts they are meant to serve. We build tools that function in low-infrastructure environments, not as afterthoughts, but as starting points. We treat operational complexity not as a deterrent, but as design criteria.
Alongside this, we build science-backed wellness products rooted in African medicinal knowledge and rigorous formulation science. Not as trends. But as an entry point for trust - a way to engage women directly, consistently, and respectfully. Over time, these two streams create something that has historically been missing: structured, context-specific insight into African women’s health.
Not extracted.
Not outsourced.
Generated with intention.
My work is deliberate. It is sequenced. It is patient.
Impact in health does not come from urgency alone, it comes from building in the right order.
Belonging
Before Misala, I worked in rooms I was told I did not belong in.
Rooms where desirable outcomes were debated and funding decisions quietly shaped which diseases would matter - and to whom.
With my training, credentials, accolades, I never doubted my competence.
The doubt came in the form of subtle recalculations in conversation, in unspoken assumptions about who is technical and who is peripheral, in the quiet surprise that someone who looks like me could occupy the centre of highly specialized scientific discourse.
Thanks to an indestructible sense of self, carefully cultivated by my formidable heritage, I was not deterred.
But I was changed.
Because once you have sat inside systems at their highest levels, you see clearly what they optimise for. And what they do not.
And, to you
So this is a love letter to women who look like me.
To the women who have been treated as rare or biologically irrelevant.
To the women dismissed as complex, whose health outcomes are trivialised.
To the women whose realities do not align with models that were never designed with us in mind.
You are not a footnote. You are the reference point.
You are the reason Misala exists.
Because love, when it is serious, builds.
And at this table, there will always be room for you.