EP 51 – Edward Booty – CEO at reach52 – How Do We Act In a More Inclusive Way?

Read the best-effort transcript below (This technology is still not as good as they say it is…):

Michael Waitze 0:00
Okay, we’re on. Hi, this is Michael Waitze. And welcome back to the Social Innovation Podcast. Today we are being joined by Ed Bootyy, the founder and the CEO of reach52. We’ll get to the name. I love the name, by the way, and it’s great to have you on the show. How are you doing today?

Edward Booty 0:17
I’m very well, thank you, Michael, and thank you very much for the invite on the show.

Michael Waitze 0:22
It is completely my pleasure. Before we get into the main part of this conversation, let’s give our listeners a little bit of your background for some context.

Edward Booty 0:32
Sure, from the UK originally, as you can probably tell from my accent, yeah, very normal family went to a university ended up traveling round India after university, obviously, subsequently gone on now to found reach52. But, you know, I think my career prior to this was what led me to be on this podcast today, I guess, whilst in India, you know, really exposed to a lot of poverty and, and, you know, difficulties and people accessing traditional services I took for granted in the UK in London, subsequently ended up working in Mumbai, for a big pharmaceutical company looking at access to medicine, and basically creating new business models for emerging markets, you know, for profit, but trying to increase access to medicines in rural India, really fell in love with the concept of social business then, and you know, sort of firsthand with this pharma company, so how difficult it was to basically, you know, increase access to their products, where there is a lack of a functioning health system and really want to do something around access to health and digital health, subsequently worked in the UK and consulting, mainly all for the UK health sector. And then went on to found reach 52 days, yeah, a sort of blend of the experience prior. Like I said,

Michael Waitze 1:46
Look, a lot of people want to travel when school’s over write, but not a lot of people go to India, because they feel like for some reason that maybe they won’t fit in, or there’s some other reason why, what was the impetus for you for going to India, it sounds very particular to me.

Edward Booty 2:00
There’s probably two or three factors with hindsight. Firstly, my dad’s saying to me, I wish I traveled when I was a kid, too, you know, you’re going to work for the rest of your life, you’re never going to be this Footloose again. So I wish I went traveling when I was your age. And that definitely put the idea in my head, just in general wants to see the world a bit, I guess. And he kind of lent me some money to do that, you know. And then secondly, India, you know, I was wanted a culture shock. Firstly, so I didn’t want to go anywhere to do with Europe, I don’t want to go to America, or Canada, or Australia, or New Zealand, as is often the case, I really just wanted to go somewhere big, crazy, loud and exciting. And then yeah, this sort of way that I actually did that as well was a bit of, I wanted it to be a free adventure, if you will. So one way fly two nights in a hotel in Mumbai. And, you know, had a bit of cash in my bank and a backpack and wanted to see where I ended up and ended up traveling for nine months, you know, six countries or seven countries and subsequently worked in India, and then back end of that, but it was more just yet seeing where you end up and going with the flow kind of trip rally. It was great.

Michael Waitze 3:02
Do you think if you had stayed in the UK, or frankly, if you had been from the United States, if you had been from France, and you just stayed in your home country, and somebody had explained to you what they saw during their travels in India, then you would have been able to understand all of the things that you learned about access to health care, and even other just basic services, when that person came home and said to you, hey, it’s different there than it is here? Or do you think you kind of have to go there to experience it yourself? To then have this mindset change about access to those services?

Edward Booty 3:41
I guess the short answer is well, no. Yeah. I mean, yeah, secondhand information, in principle is never the same as Yeah, deep immersive learning experiences. I mean, even now, are we 52, we do a lot of access to health care work. And so much of that is just about, you know, don’t really work with patients work with the people, you know, spend a day in their shoes, this kind of logic to really open their challenges to subsequently think about problems. And yet so much market research almost nowadays is based on that principle. So I don’t think it can be secondhand a half about this before. I mean, as a sort of parallel example, I’ve been to India, but I’ve never been to Latin America, if you were to explain to me now what it’s like for Latin American healthcare, I think I got properly tuned into that better, because the illusion of the, you know, the nice UK life has been broken. So perhaps once you’ve had a degree of exposure to, you know, beyond your current parameters of knowledge, it’s easier to absorb other information. But yeah, definitely, I think seeing it for real, is definitely most important. The amount of people that have joined us We’re now about 50 or so people in the in the startup and they think they know what they’re getting into when they join route 52. But then when they actually see it, and they actually realize I’d say at least half our staff have been like, you know, oh shit, I didn’t realize how bad health Access was I didn’t realize that was a problem. I just assumed that would be there, you know, like basic vaccines for babies. I didn’t realize it was that bad. So yeah, even people now that have worked in healthcare that want to work for what, what we do you see a pretty big disconnect in terms of perceptions versus reality that you can only really see what emotion goes up.

Michael Waitze 5:21
But this idea that just the basic necessities, aren’t there, all of these things we take for granted in the West. I think it’s really great for the people that join to see that they’re not there. I’m guessing that they become even more committed to this. And now maybe you can say why the name of this company because frankly, I didn’t know either. I do now. It’s called reach 52. Because it doesn’t say like telemedicine. It doesn’t say health access, it doesn’t say anything like that. It just says reach 52 Why don’t we explain to people what that really means?

Edward Booty 5:51
Perfect, not 52 weeks of the year or 2052. glitches, commonly what

Michael Waitze 5:56
some people would think, though, right? Yeah, of

Edward Booty 5:59
course. Yeah, it’s very common people think that according to a 2018, World Health Organization, and World Bank report 3.7 billion people on our planet, or 52%, the world cannot access essential health care services. So we want to reach the 52% I guess, put simply, it’s our problem statement. And our mission in two simple, you know, words or, you know, reach 52 That yet sort of encapsulates who we are what we’re trying to do. And obviously, the problem we’re trying to solve, which I really like, because the team came up with it, we used to be called something different. There’s not important now, I guess. Yeah, we sort of rebranded the org. Yeah, and this was a sort of a name that the team in the Philippines came up with people voted this stock, and yet we rebranded you know, through the team’s Democratic vote, basically. But I love our name, our brand, really trying to push 50%

Michael Waitze 6:54
When I was at Macquarie securities, there was this one kind of security that was getting sold by some other company, it was just a bad name. And we used to say like, if you didn’t understand what the product was, it was in the name. Now, I may get this wrong. But in the UK, you have a much better way to say this, like the name is on the tin. If I said it, right. And that’s why I love the name of this company. That’s what it says on the tin. Yeah, I love it, because that’s what it says on the tin 52% of the world can access like basic health care. So how do you solve this? Like, what kind of new things need to happen? What kind of new tools? Are there’s a new technology that needs to be developed? Or is it just it’s out there, but it’s not being served properly?

Edward Booty 7:35
Oh, that’s a great question. And so many different facets to that. Go for it. Yeah, how I’d like to unpack that a bit, actually. So actually, so the problem is why the 52% of the world can’t access health care. Now, as a chronic shortage of health workers just straight up, there’s 18 million nurses missing from the workforce. And then as I often say, you know, internally, let’s just imagine 18 million nurses automatically appeared in low income, low and middle income countries, they’re not going to perfectly distribute across rural areas, they’re going to gravitate towards cities, it’s probably going to be a brain drain towards Singapore, US Dubai, wherever, and they’re not gonna stay in their home country. So ultimately, due to sort of economic, you know, income forces, the urban areas will always have a shortage of health workers, where we work, there’s often one doctor for 100,000 people where there shouldn’t be 100. And it’s that that is not uncommon, you know, it should be 100 doctors and there’s literally one serving that that community needs. So chronic shortage, understaffing under skill, investment, or, you know, lack of human resources, I guess it’s the sort of first big problem that we see. Often modern telehealth models don’t work. Because half the world can’t access health care, but about 25%, the world still can’t access the internet, and maybe older people and so on, and not digitally literate anyway. So digital innovation to solve those problems often severely hampered as well, in more rural, disconnected areas, which is where we focus, obviously, a huge lack of funding huge lack of commercial opportunities. So governments are poorer and don’t have the ability to pay for health care. These are poor countries. And similarly, the people are poor and can’t pay for themselves, which means businesses don’t want to fill the void, if you will. Unlike many markets, America is a private health system. That is a hugely wealthy country, and therefore private sector does the job of government in that case, that’s simply there’s no business opportunity, and there’s no government funding in poorer countries, and therefore it sort of flips slipped through the gap. So I can there’s sort of three things that I’m constantly grappling with. Going back to the genesis of route 52. We’ll talk about our current model later. This is not what we do now. But absolutely. The first principle that I had was there’s enough medicines, vaccines, goodwill in there, people are coming more socially responsible. Climate change is on the agenda, all this sort of social sentiment is you To increase it, and what the world needs are, what poorer countries need is basic, accessible health care, let’s just all get together and try to align and you know, pull in some medicines from partner wine or people from part two and, and push that together into a sort of cohesive force that didn’t really work, you know, trying to get people to align to solve the problem, like businesses and governments build that platform, I guess, mainly, because it’s just too hard to align those different stakeholders to sort of all working independently. So the sort of answers are out there. We don’t need bleeding edge innovation, we don’t need new medicines, we’re talking basic vaccines, basic antibiotic basic diabetes, hypertension, medicines, basic sanitary pads, determinants, you know, calcium tablets, all this stuff that, as you rightly say, we take for granted and everybody has had in developed countries is what emerging markets don’t have, because they can’t afford to buy

Michael Waitze 10:54
it. Would you say that it is the case that there isn’t enough of everything to go around. But then getting access to the people that needed the most that don’t have it that either the logistics or the distribution, or the cost is preventing people from getting it? You know what I mean? In other words, let’s say the world needed, I’m gonna make stuff up. Yeah, like a million in total tablets of medicine, X, whatever it is, yeah. But only 500,000 of them needed to go to developed countries. And the other 500,000 are just sitting in a warehouse somewhere, or dying in a valley somewhere where they could be distributed to people. But either A, the government can’t afford it, which is a ridiculous reason not to give it to somebody be the transportations too expensive. Or see the people and this is where it gets really interesting for me that the people that would need it, don’t know, I really want to talk about a little bit about this to what I’ll call we talk a lot about in FinTech and InsurTech, literacy, insurance, literacy, financial literacy. But there’s got to be a health literacy problem, too, right? In other words, if I don’t know the tablet x exists, I’ll just let my you know, my friend die because I don’t know there is a solution to a two, but then you run into this problem of like you said, access to the internet. Do you understand the language in which all this stuff is written? Like, how do you solve some of all these problems? Unless I’m getting some of this wrong? Yeah.

Edward Booty 12:19
No, no, you’re definitely touched on topics that are incredibly true. Yeah, we do talk about health literacy and literacy of people to consume Health Services is absolutely what we focus a lot on. But, um, firstly, I mean, there’s never enough product in the world, you know? Yeah, a million boxes. I mean, just let’s talk about COVID vaccines for just for Christmas, there’s not been enough COVID vaccines are produced to vaccinate everybody on the planet. Yet in Africa, less than 8% of people have been vaccinated is a really simple current example. So and then yes, I think so. Does that mean someone Canada’s got the worst stockpiling there’s six vaccines in Canada, for every one person or something completely overhauled are in Canada, so sorry, Canada, if that’s not correct, but yeah, in short, there’s been enough vaccines produced yet only excellent Apple has been vaccinated. Now, to get to that second point. I mean, to what it’s worth, yet the amount of medicine is wasted. just staggering. The amount of vaccines that are wasted is staggering. The amount of stuff that’s produced that subsequently gets burned or incinerated, because it’s medical waste, and subsequently gets put in a big, you know, burner and destroyed is huge. I actually think it’s an interesting need for startups, which is trying to channel Yep, medicines that are going to expire in Singapore to Indonesia or something. But all sorts of Yeah, regulatory challenges there. Once it’s been sold to Singapore, it’s hard to, you know, take it back and then push it to another country. So definitely a lot of medical waste, and especially things like vaccines that are over produced and subsequently expired. But there is a lot of complexity and shifting them between countries, in terms of yeah, that sort of barriers to access to healthcare, he definitely touched on some of them. There’s often like, what I’ve seen in this this space, if I the five A’s of access, which is not not mine, or anything, it’s a sort of relatively common framework now, which is yet firstly, firstly, sort of awareness. So are people aware? Secondly, acceptability because a lot of you might be aware of say, you know, safe sex or, or HIV or vaccines or whatever, but is it acceptable? So accessibility of that disease and whether or not you’re willing, and then you get into access? I mean, it’s available, is it there? Is it something you can buy? Then you get into affordability? And can you actually buy it if it’s there? And is it a sort of yet affordable accessible price? And I forget the last one, but you get the point. So yeah, it’s really up with that awareness. And then big thing around its social acceptability and whether or not you know, contextually wants to do something about it. And then yeah, sort of, isn’t there logistically and is it there affordably as sort of these barriers that we have to break through in terms of healthcare? I’d also probably just add as a sort of Final sort of thought on it is, what my biggest learnings and reach 52, actually is, when there was no health care, that’s been one of our biggest problems, actually, in a way, should we do this, like a really interesting thing for me, we’ve started this nice service, access to doctors screening, and we’re gonna bring affordable medicines, you know, let’s just talk about insulin for a minute, it’s $20, we can get into $23, we’ll talk about how we do that later. But then people don’t bloody buy it. And there’s this whole frustration for me because we do have a functioning health service. But there is not that, you know, user behavior, if you will, or consumer behavior, for lack of a better phrase, to actively want to promote their own healthcare. And that’s because of deeply entrenched social and cultural beliefs that for them, and their parents and their grandparents life, that’s not really good doctors, that’s herbal medicines, it’s cracked doctors, it’s it’s pain, its weight and do nothing, it’s just let it subside. And, and because of, you know, a sort of dearth of any services available, you are a sort of bad consumer of healthcare. And then subsequently, I’ve seen some really interesting arguments around this, which is because people don’t really want it, it doesn’t really go on the political agenda. And because it’s not a political or politics agenda in terms of winning the votes, it doesn’t really get prioritized in terms of spending because people want better roads or something, they can see our infrastructure or something like this, because the people aren’t shouting very loud, it doesn’t get on the political agenda funding stays low. And it just sort of drives this cycle, because there’s not that citizen demand for it.

Michael Waitze 16:32
So what is reach 52? Doing? I mean to address, I don’t even know where to start there. Sounds like there are so many, I don’t want to say intractable, but it sounds like there are a lot of issues here. What is the focus? Maybe you can use insulin as an example of how you get it to people, but then also convincing them to buy it if they have to change their consumption habits or whatever it is, like, how do you address this stuff as read? 52?

Edward Booty 16:58
Yeah, sure. And I mean, yeah, sort of part of telling my sort of personal, you know, career today definitely joins together these experiences. So yeah, go back to Novartis businesses want to do social good, they’re often willing to give discounts for medicines. But if they’re to do it alone, ie, you know, do the awareness for diabetes, do the screening and then sell heavily discounted medicine, the business model doesn’t stack up a high cost and low revenue, then I went to the UK health sector, it’s all about digital first make a digital task shifting, get people out of hospitals, to primary care, all this sort of modern healthcare stuff. So every computer in the entire concept and current model is born and being delivered around those sort of two, you know, previous experiences that I had. So we built a tech platform where we’re going to non urban areas. So out of cities, we train one or two people that we call an agent, and are often the community health workers. So government linked health workers, as well as independent and trusted people for health care advice that can be a pharmacist or local, you know, elder of a village or something like this. We train them with they often have a phone and they use a tech platform we’ve built basically do three things. Firstly, they go to every house in their village and collect data on health and well being needs. So do you smoke, do you drink? Do you have any of these diseases and ask a range of questions that help us understand individual household and community level health issues. Based on having that network of agents and data, we then run more targeted health awareness and screening campaigns, based on their, you know, localized needs a lot around diabetes, hypertension, maternal health back, we’re doing a lot of on COVID-19 vaccines at the moment and a range of other diseases but trying to take sort of precision and personalized approach to public health care. And that’s generally funded by businesses either to open emerging markets do some good social business, or in foundations, we also have like UNICEF, and people like this as well. But we build an ad network, collect the data run sort of targeted, personalized health campaigns. And then lastly, given healthcare is heavily privatized and paid out of pocket. We also looked for these agents to facilitate access to affordable or discounted private sector products, which started off in pharmaceuticals, ie medicines that we’ve subsequently done probably a lot more in consumer health, vitamins, feminine care, this kind of stuff. And also affordable low cost health insurance. So the agents are point where you could find the agent and Michael, you’re the user, if you will, I’ve collected data on you. I’ve knocked on your door and said, you know, you might be at risk of this Do you mind if I screen you for that or let’s go to this, you know, maternal health event next week with your wife or whatever it might be. And then if you need something, you can come to me and I’m a sort of access to a marketplace and we look to give access to affordable accessible products. I manage the distribution through the agents back to the communities just in terms of it We are Yeah, five years old since I set this up, started in the Philippines, subsequently grown into Cambodia, Indonesia, India, and Kenya. We just launched in East Africa last year, about 50 staff in the offices, as I mentioned, and about five and a half 1000 agents at the moment, health work agents, you know, using our platform, about a million people use our services at the moment. So we’re not million people. But 1.1, I think I saw our numbers earlier, said about 1.1. And we screened about 430,000 people last year for diseases, most of our growth came last year after COVID subsided a bit. So yeah, 450,000 screenings last year, and we added, yeah, a lot of our agents and stuff last year, so we’re not tiny, but we’re and we’re obviously covering a small percentage of the countries that we operate in, but growing quite nicely, a biggest corporate partners at Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer, a Unilever, some of these sort of big brands are working with us on you know, pure social impact or social business, you know, we’ll sell some products, and we’ll try and do some public health good at the same time, kind of campaigns. That’s what we do. And then yeah, joining it all back to my previous experiences, it’s really about working with private sector and government to try and you know, open emerging markets, right, where we’re pro business, I want to start up, we are a business, but in a more sort of ethical and social way, and do it in a digital and data driven way. As a sort of first allowing the sort of emerging markets health systems to leak from some sort of traditional brick and mortar infrastructure.

Michael Waitze 21:36
That was an amazing explanation. I’m curious what you think the biggest, like stumbling block is for you. In other words, when you go into these communities, now these agents, right, if they’re two people, they’re three people there, if it’s a pharmacist, or even if it’s a, you know, trained health worker, when they go into people’s houses, is the first reaction like, please get out of my house politely, like does it have to have do you have to get some momentum in this place? Wherever it is? Because the idea is like if the social norms don’t accept health care, right, even if it’s available, because like, either a I’m not sick or be just going to let this ride, which is normal. Right? That’s like a normal human reaction at the beginning. Right, because maybe they’ve been burned by drug usage, or, you know, some medicines that didn’t work, as they would said, or there was no doctor there. What are these biggest roadblocks that you have? And then when those fall? How fast is the uptake? Do you know what I mean?

Edward Booty 22:30
Yeah, yes. Good. So yeah, no shortage of blockers, or difficulties that we face. Quite like 10 In total, or something. So I won’t go into all of them here. But firstly, I mean, just just something. Yeah. So firstly, started off the 80s, the pace of change is slow, we all work to get the endorsement, we often have to work with governments, we obviously obviously have to have permits, and so on and so forth. So yeah, it’s often hard to set up with to get, you know, users or the residents to work with us, we do have government endorsement and government engagements that will take months, if not years to set up in many cases. So there’s a high, you know, barrier to entry, if you will, just through the the pace of getting bits of paper that allow us to do that. And give back to the endorsement, which directly links to why people work with us, rather than you know, we’re really happy to work in partnership with your local health center, which often has a degree of respect, and you know, you know, the credibility in terms of people working with us. So yeah, why people trust us, it’s generally because we have endorsements and have people that they trust. And that’s been a big thing that we focused on. And one of the big ways that we have grown well, is because we invest in those structural or contextual relationships first to get the buy in what we do. Other big challenges, definitely. I mean, I always say infrastructure is number one. So internet sucks. Phones are old, and lack of payments, infrastructure. That’s one of our big ones. I said, we didn’t I didn’t come to the incident example earlier. We can happily do some journeys later. And do it now. Though, yeah. Imagine like, Yeah, we’re gonna go and train an agent. So

Michael Waitze 24:06
I hope you don’t mind me interrupting you. But I hadn’t thought about this, right? I can’t, all this stuff we take for granted. I never considered like, payment for service would be a hard thing. But if you’re in an excerpt of a third tier cities somewhere, right? And, first of all, if you’re not used to getting health care, and then you’d get it, it’s like you just walk down to the bank and pay for it or you write a check, where you just pay out of your crypto wallet. Do you know what I mean? Like I just hadn’t thought about it. So take me through how this works, actually. Yeah, well,

Edward Booty 24:38
firstly, I’m just on that specific point. And then we’ll sort of walk you through end to end in a way but yeah, cash cash in more caches is obviously the case in the Philippines. I don’t think we’ve ever done a bank based payments. I think I saw I think of our own data. We do collect as part of the upfront signup that people have a bank account, but I think it’s close to 90% of people in our Philippine communities are unbanked. In India, Kenya, Indonesia, it’s a more widely available and quality wallets. But in some countries, it is cash, cash and cash is how we have to solve a problem. And then, you know, if you’re just selling a medicine, you got to pull the money and put it all back, or the operations, logistics risk of that, you know, makes our lives harder, especially when there’s bad internet. We’ve had to make all of our tech work offline for what it’s worth that app. You know, most apps can rely on a server based, you know, processing operation. Server, we bought everything offline first. So it has to sync once a month work on really old Android, really low RAM phones. So we’ve actually done some quite complex engineering to make our app and all the logic within it, self contained fully offline, fully encrypted, and just yet sync sync periodically, basically, other than yet playing that all through. Yeah, if we just go to raw Philippines, our first mock, I lived in Philippines for a year and a half to set up. So it’s one that I’m very much immersed in, if you will. But yeah, we go to one of these rural areas, yes, slow to get the government permits, when we finally get it, that’s good when they have to find some agents, agents, obviously, everything the rural area, not the highest, you know, educational attainment, so you have the complexity of training people, and how to make that suitable and more complex topics such as healthcare access or screening, somebody got diabetes, you know, through that level, something explaining some of these, you know, slightly abstract concepts of healthcare, then yeah, no digital literacy. 60% of our communities and Philippines don’t have the internet. So we have to work fully offline. If there’s any problems or escalations, that obviously adds problems in terms of just reporting back, you know, let’s just say there’s a problem or troubleshooting with the app or something just becomes incredibly complex. But we train the agent, often Yeah, digital literacy, not super, super used to us in tech, they would then go door to door and collect the data, as you say, sometimes reticence but we’ve actually found that it’s the reverse problem, which is the people often, you know, healthcare seen as an aspirational middle class thing. So if you’re someone that opposite, they’re actually too willing to give you their data. So you’ve sort of taken the angle of that out of my house, it’s actually like, oh, healthcare, this is the you know, the, the people in the cities have, I want that, therefore, I’ll tell you everything about me, and I don’t care about the terms and conditions within a lot around capturing legitimate consent, do it really explaining people’s data, privacy rights to videos, animations, and flyers and stuff like this so authentically and authentically, but really get consent, not just getting them tick a box, because that’s where it for lack of a better phrase, but that’s not ethical or meaningful. So we have to educate them on consent, which adds time to our processes, but it’s the right thing to do, then we have that data. And then we want to obviously run the more targeted campaigns, then he says, So, awareness, and you know, to what extent do you want this service try and drive them to actually be health seeking is obviously then the next big challenge, obviously, challenges about who pays businesses often pay if there’s a commercial opportunity, but it’s quite hard to make the p&l stuck up on lower income people that can’t pay very much. So if you’re trying to then get the funding, but then the funding is either very traditional for grants and stuff, or, you know, rightly, you know, commercially or business orientated, and the p&l is often hard to make work some of our partnerships, then when you’re driving the campaigns, and you’ve actually got the money, you know, it’s interesting to see how lower differences so yeah, just as a new getting people the medicine, they need it, they’re diabetic or whatever. But people still even UK or Singapore, people are pretty bad at taking their medicines a lot of the time. So yeah, it’s exactly the same. I mean, like yet, my grandmother has often taken her hypertension medicine, why is that people are not

Edward Booty 28:48
sometimes taking the antibiotics, so and then we finally almost get a sale on the market place. So they bought into them. But then you have that stickiness, almost problem in a startup language. But also yet people are not very adherent to health regimes. They have regulatory problems. You know, if you think about all of the above, it’s regulated in a traditional way, ie medicine should be in pharmacies and diagnosis clinics, by the way, there are no pharmacies, and there’s very limited tenants and very limited doctors. So we’re trying to do it in a decentralized way, where the regulations just blocking us every ways. We’re constantly trying to change how we do stuff and try and do it in a in a sort of lightweight way, which is right, given the context, but then the regular regulation is often you know, obviously a bit more traditional, which I’m not going to opposed to medicine should be in the pharmacy or whatever. Yeah, that’s one of our big blockers as well of just doing this all legally, ultimately, yeah. And that’s probably how it works really in that base. Ultimately, yeah, so growing and working, but there’s all those yet challenges that get baked in along the way of sadness, sort of, yeah, agent network up and subsequently delivering services and getting paid for it, I guess.

Michael Waitze 29:59
Do you think Healthcare is a human right, huh?

Edward Booty 30:05
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. I wouldn’t necessarily phrase it like that. I mean, it’s, it’s more that, I believe if there’s something that solves very basic problems, I mean, this is what the phrase that I’ve come up with in my head that I really liked. I remember one phrase and you listen to this podcast I’d like to remember is that the medicines that will save people’s lives in emerging market cost less than your Starbucks in the morning? That’s what, yeah, more. Yep. It’s like, it’s not the health because of humans, right? It’s just that, you know, capitalist or, you know, the social constructs of our world means that people die for shit that cost two to $3 that are vastly more. So my bit more like interested in that equitable distribution of resources. And that would also be true for education, and, you know, a right to schooling and all this stuff. Again, we don’t need a brand new primary care model for school and in rural India, right, you know, we have that already. So it’s just how do we act in a more inclusive way for various, you know, foundational things that allow people to have the best chance to prosper, which would include Yeah, income and income generation health education.

Michael Waitze 31:21
If a potential partner wanted to reach out and contact you, or if somebody wanted to help you, or somebody wanted to invest in you, what’s the best way to reach you?

Edward Booty 31:31
And always I can do any of the above. So yeah, LinkedIn edit booty obviously reach 52 borrower website, or Yeah, obviously, my email, reach 52. Yeah, I’m always open. I mean, we are we’ve been built, and a lot of, you know, goodwill and great people that have wanted to help us out, you know, from both business partners through to a huge amount of interns, and volunteers, and so on, that have helped us and been involved. So yeah, you want to help out and do something interesting. Get in touch for sure. And I think what has worked, what am I most boiling it all down in a different way. One of my most enjoyable things about doing this, too, is that it’s incredibly meaningful. And it’s incredibly challenging. And therefore you have to be incredibly innovative. And it’s not like, to some extent, if you want to build an app for people in London to buy food faster. And you know, all this stuff is there. It’s like, you know, integrate stripe and Facebook, AdWords and Google and all this kind of stuff, like, just like infrastructure there to potentially, you know, growth market your product and subsequently take payments. And this is like, Yeah, real problem. Really hard and properly Greenfield innovation. So for anybody wanting to get involved, it’s like, incredibly frustrating, but incredibly satisfying. And, yeah, so building from the ground up, if you know what I mean, versus just tapping into existing successful channels or infrastructure to build a business or whatever.

Michael Waitze 32:54
It’s so much more rewarding. I mean, I used to say this about like, why are you what not you but like, why is one striving to build the next Instagram when you could change the world? Yeah, yeah, that’s the way I feel about it. Okay, I really want to thank you for doing this for exposing all this to people and booty the founder and the CEO of reach 52. You have to come back periodically. And update me I’m not kidding. And update me on this so that people can hear and see the progress. You’ve been at this for five years. And I have to believe that the response you’re getting today is different than it was five years ago. COVID or no COVID. And that, as you get past other milestones, I’d like to find out what they are and let people know.

Edward Booty 33:37
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, firstly, if anyone if it was a thing I would like to know more obviously, yes, I plan newsletter on the website. And yeah, follow us on LinkedIn. Follow us on socials. We are actively trying to share more, we’re actually got a new initiative at the moment where we want to share more about data as well, obviously. We have the data on a million people in their health care needs. We want to do more with that, start blogging with that and really bring some of these insights tonight. That will be on our social channels and obviously love to come back and share more about our progress. Thank you for having me again, and Thanks all for listening.