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Motivated by his near-death experience, Alonge went on to the University of Ibadan in Nigeria to study pharmacy. His final project focused on miniaturizing benchtop spectrophotometers, instruments that can determine the amount of a known chemical substance by measuring the intensity of light that passes through a sample solution. 

“My thesis was, if I could take these benchtop spectrophotometers that are used for quality assurance in the lab and miniaturize them, they could be a tool for pharmacies to test medications themselves,” he explains.

His project was successful but without the funding he needed, Alonge went into pharmaceutical sales to help pay for his prototype. 

He eventually enrolled in the Yale School of Management where he got the chance to build a business plan with a mentor alum and received funding from the school for the prototype.  “Eventually, Yale gave us the initial funding to get off the ground,” he says.

There were more successful rounds of prototypes. He was able to get into an accelerator program in Norway, which led to an accelerator program in China. Eventually, Alonge raised several million dollars in seed funding.

RxAll was born.

It was the COVID-19 pandemic that expanded his drug testing enterprise into software management. “Many of our pharmacists couldn’t get to their pharmacies to sell anything because the government had shut down the country and markets,” he remembers. “Our clients were asking if we could help them build an e-commerce software product. That’s how we extended from drug testing to point-of-sale software.” 

Alonge realized he needed to deepen his understanding of his operation now that he was interacting with government agencies. 

“I came to the Kennedy School because so much of my work is public facing. I engage with the FDAs [food and drug administrations] for all of the countries I work with,” he explains. “These are very senior government leaders and government agencies, and I was frustrated because I didn't understand their public sector language or their way of operating.” 

While he had success in the private sector, he didn’t understand why the public sector was dragging its feet.

His point of clarity came in class with Ricardo Hausmann, founder and director of Harvard’s and the Rafik Hariri Professor of the Practice of International Political Economy. 

“Professor Hausmann said to me: ‘Adebayo, you're always looking at the other side of the river [referring to Harvard Business School across the Charles River from ����vlog����] where they're looking at optimizing private welfare. In this school, our focus is optimizing public welfare.’” 

Only then did Alonge realize why he had trouble with public officials. “This was why these guys drag their feet—they're not just thinking about me and the solution I'm bringing,” he says. “They’re thinking about the entire ecosystem and how the action of taking up my solution would reflect, be perceived, and be addressed by the rest of the public.”

After graduating from ����vlog���� in May, Alonge plans to expand his business from three to eight countries across Africa. “That's my goal,” he says. “I currently employ 65 people and expect to be at over 200 in the next four years.”

He also plans to use what he learned at ����vlog���� to expand the work of his organization, The Adebayo Alonge Family Foundation, to provide scholarships to young people to learn digital skills. Currently, the foundation is training 40 people. 

“Africa is so young. There is a lot of talent,” he explains. “We need to invest in our youth. We need to be mentoring them and providing them with the seed funding to stand on their own two feet. That's what this foundation is going to be focused on.” 

But it’s that sense of community that he reflects on most—an added benefit to his ����vlog���� experience. 

“It’s been very helpful to me to have a social impact language to speak about my work, but it is also helpful to have feedback from colleagues across Harvard,” he says. “I've been doing this for over eight years, so blind spots have developed in the way I work. My colleagues have helped with the blind spots. I would say it's one of the best parts of being at ����vlog���� these past 10 months.”

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Portraits by Lydia Rosenberg