At Yanga, Dentistry Plus the Gig Economy Equals Greater Access to Care for Nigerians

Co-founders Joachim Ehis Okojie, BDS, and Chukwuebuka Anyaeji, BDS, have built an “infrastructure-as-a-service” company that helps newly-minted dentists get their careers launched while providing high-quality, lower-cost care to patients.

Challenge

Five years ago, Joachim Ehis Okojie and Chukwuebuka Anyaeji were freshly-minted dentists, graduates of the prestigious University of Lagos in Nigeria. Like any new dentists, they were eager to get their practices up and running. After their years of study and training, it was time to get to work.

Easier said than done. Setting up a dental practice is a huge cost, no matter where in the world you do it. Between X-ray machines, administrative staff, equipment, dental chairs, and the like, even a small practice sets a dentist back a formidable sum of money. In Nigeria, there is limited access to financing so a new dentist ends up joining an established practice or working in a government facility because they can’t secure a loan for their own practice.

And then there’s a matter of gaining patients. Although the dental industry in Nigeria is majorly understaffed (one estimate puts it at one dentist to 148,000 Nigerians), dental facilities struggle to fill their appointments.

“In this part of the world,” Dr. Okojie explains, “people don’t see the value in attending dental clinics. When you look deeper at the issue, you see that part of the reason is cost.”

The average cost of a routine dental appointment in Lagos, with X-rays, cleaning, and checkup, comes to the equivalent of about $150. Compared to the average income for someone in Lagos, this cost sits higher than many people can afford. Even if they can afford it, there’s also an educational aspect to getting a population on board with regular dental care.

“Understanding the need is a huge part of the equation as well,” Dr. Okojie says.

Not only does regular dental care save huge costs down the road in terms of preventing cavities and the need for emergency treatments, but research suggests strong connections between oral health and overall health. Gum disease, for example, is associated with heart disease, diabetes, respiratory conditions, and more recently, Alzheimer’s disease. Changing a population’s view of dentistry and increasing their access to care impacts far more than their smiles.

Origin Story

In the beginning of 2020, Drs. Anyaeji and Okojie started to discuss how to improve access to regular dental care in Nigeria. What do you do when you have a grossly underserved population, dentists who can’t afford to set up their own practices, and existing dental practices who can’t fill up their appointment slots because of cost issues?

They came to a beautifully simple answer: if you can leverage the facilities that already exist, a new dentist could rent space in an established practice to build up his or her own practice. It’s tapping into the gig economy for dentists. It drives costs down for the patients because the dentist isn’t paying off the entire cost of setting up a space, allowing the dentists to attract clients who might otherwise wait to see a dentist until a serious problem arises.

The partners scraped together enough funds to set up an initial branch to test their idea. In 2021, they opened Yanga — a one-chair facility with X-ray capacity and a front desk administrator. Dentists simply booked a time slot, walked in, and had everything they needed to care for their patients. In exchange, the dentists paid a percentage of what they earned.

The experiment worked. The Yanga Dental Clinic grew from one chair to three chairs, with 53 dentists regularly using the facility to see patients. On any given day, six to eight dentists come into Yanga, building their clientele and establishing their own practices.

“We built it into a full service one-stop shop. In the past 17 months, the clinic has seen 1600 patients.”

Under the Hood

To get started at Yanga, a dentist signs up to join on their website and pays a very low annual fee (the equivalent of about $10). They then receive access to a personalized booking page where they can list the services they offer and the cost. Patients book through the website and come to the Yanga facility for treatment. Patients pay at the Yanga front desk, or Yanga bills their insurance, and Yanga pays the dentists at the end of each business day after taking a small percentage of the bill.

A few factors are fueling Yanga’s success and shaping their roadmap for the future. First, while they don’t set the fees for the dentists using the space, they strongly encourage them to charge within certain ranges to keep the price accessible to patients. Yanga keeps the annual subscription fee they charge the dentists low, to help them pass on the savings to clients.

Additionally, they’ve focused on marketing to help Yanga dentists acquire new patients. Their Instagram feed, for example, educates consumers on the benefits of regular dental care with vibrant, culturally-relevant posts. Part of their aim with these posts is to alleviate people’s dread of going to the dentist, even make it fun. The term “yanga” is the equivalent of strutting your stuff, and they encourage their clientele to enjoy flaunting their smiles.

In the past year, Yanga established partnerships with several major HMOs, including Reliance, Leadway Health, and Hygeia. Not only does this help the dentists with patient acquisition, but the Yanga administrator also takes on the headache of filing and settling claims for the dentists, further simplifying the process of getting a new practice up and running. They’ve also built relationships with pharmacies in the city, so that pharmacists can refer people with tooth complaints to Yanga for affordable care.

Currently, the Yanga team is building out the tech side of the business so it becomes an end-to-end solution for both dentists and patients. The Yanga app allows patients to schedule appointments and pay bills and dentists to set up their schedule and a virtual wallet to receive payments. It also will enable Yanga to expand its services across Lagos, the biggest city in Africa, and beyond to more remote parts of the country, as well as across West Africa.

“We’re optimistic about the model. We’ve seen that it works. And now we have a lot of requests from different cities. We want to increase access to dental care for all of Nigeria, starting in Lagos and going everywhere.”

Why We’re Proud to Invest

Yanga has created a healthcare infrastructure service that taps into existing resources to provide affordable dental care. We’re proud to back this smart approach that harnesses the gig economy to drive down costs for the consumer, while providing dentists the space and tools they need to work. They’ve proven that it works, and they’ve set themselves up well with a vision and team to expand their approach.

If the eyes are windows to the soul, the mouth is a window into the overall health and wellbeing of a body. We believe that prioritizing dental health has far-reaching effects, and Yanga is doing amazing work to normalize routine dental care and oral hygiene in West Africa. Their marketing and messaging communicates the benefits of taking care of teeth clearly and respectfully. It’s a thoughtful and effective approach that is helping them create a new consumer base in Lagos.

We’re excited to see how the app they’re developing allows their dentistry model to travel to other parts of Nigeria and West Africa, especially remote areas that are underserved. As they continue to build partnerships with HMOs and health insurance companies, they can expand their reach and set up clinics where they are needed most. It’s a big challenge but one Yanga is ready to sink its teeth into.

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At Yanga, Dentistry Plus the Gig Economy Equals Greater Access to Care for Nigerians was originally published in StartUp Health on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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