Leanna Byrne

and Christianity on the other.

She describes it as a pretty typical middle-class upbringing where education really mattered, but business and side hustles were just part of everyday life too.

That mix of expectations, a strong focus on education, alongside exposure to different kinds of work, meant that by her teenage years, she was already thinking quite practically about her future.

After qualifying as a pharmacist in the early 2000s, Abimbola went on to build on that training, later doing an MBA at the University of Lagos and studying at the Joseph Business School in Lagos.

She also moved between different parts of the healthcare and business world, shaped in part by a childhood that included frequent travel due to her father's work.

That exposed her to different markets early on.

It was through all of that that she began to see just how uneven access to medicines really was.

The moment she points to happened in 2016 when a relative needed a colostomy bag, a basic medical item she assumed would be easy to find.

It wasn't.

Early on in her career, she started looking beyond the day-to-day of pharmacy.

She became more invested in how systems work and why they sometimes don't.

Abimbola set up Advantage Health Africa in 2017, at a time when e-commerce in Nigeria was still finding its feet, and getting medicines delivered wasn't something most people expected.

But she wasn't just thinking about individual orders, she wanted to build something that could work across the whole system.

And bootstrapping is essentially when you're self-funding, right?

That must have been hard too.

What was your first customer and how did that all go?

Did you learn from that?

And were there any points where it was a challenge for you and you had to pivot or you just had to change tact or you learn things from your customers that you didn't realize?

You're listening to Meet the Founders from Business Daily on the BBC World Service.

Today I'm speaking to Abimbola Adebakken, founder of Advantage Health Africa, a company working to improve access to medicines across Nigeria.