Nigerian health-tech startup Medsaf has let off 30 full-time staff members of the company.
According to the TechCabal, the company’s COO, Rotimi Lawal, informed staff members via Slack that Medsaf had to reduce staff due to “challenges ranging from funding gaps to account receivables due to different the macroeconomic policies and dismal payment behavior of hospitals in our industry.”
Several staff members acknowledged that they hadn’t received salaries since December 2022 at the time of Lawal’s Slack message. The company acknowledged the delays in salary payments and pledged to fulfill its commitment. “In the context of how work activity has fared so far this year, with the majority of the employees staying at home and doing little or no work, the Company will be paying full salary for December 2022 to those who I haven’t paid yet and half payments for January 2023 up till March 2023. These payments will be made to the staff’s bank account in the Month of April 2023,” Lawal stated in the Slack message.
The company only paid salary for the month of March, according to a former employee who talked to TechCabal on the condition of anonymity. Additionally, they claimed that their pay-as-you-earn tax and pension payments were not made.
Medsaf’s CEO, Nwakah, blamed the problem on investors who went back their funding pledges in an email answer to TechCabal. “The funds we were expecting would have been enough to extend our run rate for 1.5 years and allow us to close on a $2m loan that would push our company into profitability. We told people not to come to work in January and told people formally that we were not extending their roles in March. So many of the employees that you are speaking with hardly worked in January and are requesting salaries that are owed to them when they were not actively working for the company,” she said.
In order to fight against fake drugs in Nigeria and other parts of Africa, Vivian Nwakah co-founded Medsaf in 2017.
