Champions of Change Blog

Empowering People Worldwide to Fight Counterfeit Drugs

Ashifi Gogo is being honored as a Champion of Change for his accomplishments as an immigrant entrepreneur and innovator.

When you think about counterfeit products, what do you imagine? Do you envision fake Prada bags hanging in an open-air market, or poorly duplicated DVD knock-offs on a makeshift table in New York City? How about potentially harmful or fatal counterfeit drugs sold in pharmacies and on makeshift street carts? Many emerging markets, like my home country Ghana, face the latter issue every single day.

If you don a fake bag, you likely won’t get hurt or die from it, but consuming fake medication is a whole different story. Counterfeiters don’t abide by any quality standards, so taking a fake drug could mean consuming something made out of relatively harmless ingredients like starch or chalk—or worse, harmful ingredients like anti-freeze, heavy metals and brick dust. In both cases, the active ingredient could be in wrong doses or could not be present at all, rendering the drug purchased with hard-earned money essentially useless. With over 700,000 people dying every year from fake tuberculosis and antimalarial drugs alone—the equivalent of five fully packed jumbo jets crashing every day—the threat of counterfeit medicine is all too real.

Meanwhile, mobile technology in emerging markets is booming. Mobile phone subscriptions globally jumped from under one billion in 2000 to over six billion in 2012—five billion of which are in emerging markets.  How could we take this positive trend and use it to address a serious global problem like drug counterfeiting?

While pursuing my Engineering Ph.D. at Dartmouth College, I developed technology that answered that question. Mobile Product Authentication allows consumers to use their mobile phone to verify that the products they are buying are the real deal. The solution is simple: before purchasing a product, a consumer will scratch off a part of a security label that will reveal a unique, one time use PIN that is texted to us for free. The consumer will then receive a reply stating that the product is genuine, fake, or even stolen.

In 2010, we piloted the solution in Nigeria with Merck KGaA’s in-market representative using the diabetes treatment drug Glucophage.  The pilot was such a success that we have since expanded our operations to five countries across three continents. We now protect products across various industries, including automotive, electrical goods, and textiles and clothing.

By empowering people to fight for their basic right to be safe from dangerous products like fake medicine, we can help foster positive change in the world. We can see statistics on unnecessary deaths from counterfeit products dwindle, ideally to zero.

I often think about how we took a positive trend in mobile technology and used it to develop a solution that saves lives, and I reflect on how we could apply that logic to address issues in our community and in our world. What positive trends do you see around you? How can you use those trends as fuel to give back to your community, to your country, to the world? How can you take an everyday object like a mobile phone and turn it into a weapon of mass construction? Sometimes the solution to problems is as simple as reaching into your pocket.

Ashifi Gogo is CEO of Sproxil, Inc.

Improving Lives in the Land of Opportunity

Shradha Agarwal is being honored as a Champion of Change for her accomplishments as an immigrant entrepreneur and innovator.

I was born to hard-working and ambitious parents who started life with little more than an education and a desire to do well. Their goal in life was to provide opportunities for their children so that we could then go on to contribute to the world, without such basic worries as feeding our family or keeping a roof above our heads.

One other dream my mother saw for my brother and me was an American education.  She saw it as a route to opportunities to fulfill our destiny and to make an impact on the world we live in. Growing up in India, education is a necessity, but not sufficient alone to make a healthy living so that one can afford the luxury of working towards impacting the world. She wanted us to arrive at the “Land of Opportunity,” where armed with a solid education, ambition, work ethic, and tenacity, one can truly participate in projects, initiatives, and organizations that are answering difficult questions and seeking solutions to world problems such as disease and hunger.

With this ambition in my genes, I arrived in Chicago on September 5, 2004, and enrolled in the journalism program at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. While on a scholarship to a United Nations high school in Singapore, United World College of South East Asia, I had identified my “calling-of-the-day” as bringing information to an audience to drive engagement and awareness.  Having reported for a local news station during the mid-term elections of 2006, I quickly saw the impact of bringing all types of powerful data to the right audience at the right time and in the right place.

In 2006, my college friends and I had an idea—installing media screens in waiting areas of physician practices and showing videos about simple lifestyle changes that improve lives for those diagnosed with a chronic condition, such as diabetes. Now in its seventh  year, ContextMedia has hired almost 50 employees and is generating millions of dollars in annual revenue.

Hiring and culture are very important aspects of running our own company. However, I often feel restricted in the talent we have access to—either for visa reasons or for retraining limitations. Additionally, access to capital has historically been a challenge in our growth. As an immigrant, I also worry about my own future in this country, given the uncertainty of a path to citizenship. 

I am fortunate and grateful for the opportunities I have had in this society that truly believes in merit and each person’s potential to contribute, more than it focuses on color, religion, gender, or age. We live in an interesting economic time marked by the global recession, but by offering resources to entrepreneurs to build companies, create jobs, and contribute to the growth of the economy, recovery is possible. This country, more than most other European, African, or Asian countries, acknowledges and encourages entrepreneurship. While no country is perfect, the United States of America is a nation built on free enterprise, creative thinking, and risk-taking, which has allowed me to contribute back as an entrepreneur and investor. I look forward to continuing to expand and inspire others to follow their dreams and utilize the resources this country offers to build, grow, and give back. 

Shradha Agarwal is Co-Founder of ContextMedia.