Pharm. Adebayo Alonge is the winner of the 2019 BNP Paribas Group Deep Tech Award, also known as “Hello Tomorrow Global Challenge”. He defeated 4,500 contenders from 119 countries around the world, with the presentation of his anti-fake drugs device called RxAll Solution, which earned him the Grand Prize of €100,000.
The techy-innovative Nigerian maverick had his secondary school education at Kings College, Lagos, from 1996 to 2002. He subsequently gained admission to the University of Ibadan to study Pharmacy and graduated with distinction in 2008.
Alonge began his career in November 2009 as a medical representative at Sanofi Aventis, where he worked till September 2010. During this period, he also worked as a contract pharmacist for the Global HIV/AIDS Initiative. He then moved on to work for Roche (Now Swiss Pharma Nigeria) as a medical sales representative from 2010 to 2012.
Alonge’s passion and drive for business innovation led him to enrol for the MBA degree (with focus on Strategy and Finance) at the Lagos Business School (LBS) in October 2012. He graduated in July 2014 with distinction.
While studying at LBS, he worked at BASF as a market development intern (pharma ingredients). He later returned to BASF after the completion of his MBA programme in August 2014 to take up the position of market developer (West Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo). He was there till August 2015, about which time he gained admission to Yale School of Management, Yale University, USA, for his Master of Advanced Management degree programme.
While at Yale, Alonge worked as a consultant for Boston Consulting Group (BCG) (2015-2017) where he pioneered the first BCG office in Sub-Sahara Africa, in Lagos, Nigeria. At the completion of his programme, he proceeded to Hitotsubashi Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy for a course in Advanced Management and International Business.
Alonge is currently undertaking a Master of Public Administration (Deep Tech in Public Policy Concentration) from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, USA.
His entrepreneurial spirit spurred him to co-found RxAll Inc., in 2016, with the aim of providing a means for patients in the developing world to authenticate their medicines. He indeed has an uncommon passion to eliminate fake drugs, having almost died in infancy as a result of counterfeit medicine.
In developing the award-winning RxAll Solution, Alonge’s training and experience working for top multinational firms in Nigeria, together with the resilience of his team members proved very significant. He successfully raised about $400,000 in grants and bootstrapped funds from the Nigerian government, the Yale start-up ecosystem, Merck, Villgro and other support networks.
He is a recipient of several awards and recognitions, including: Global Social Venture Award (2016) from InnovateHealth, Yale; Young Innovator – YouWin; 2018 China Award for Best Deep Tech Platform in World; Regional finalist, Hult Prize Global Case Competition; and Adekunle Ajasin Award for Academic Excellence (2008).
The management and staff of Pharmanews join his family and colleagues to wish him many more laurels ahead.
