From a governor who couldn’t find $50 million of investment in his own state to the women who built an institution from scratch, the man who midwifed TAConnect shared its most candid origin account yet.
Dr. Joe Abba of Development Alternatives International (DAI), the international development firm that incubated TAConnect on behalf of the Gates Foundation in the years before it became an independent, Nigerian-led institution, opened his goodwill message with a scene that explains why TAConnect had to exist “You’d have Bill Gates come to Nigeria,” he recalled, “and Bill Gates would say to a governor, ‘We’ve spent fifty million dollars in your state,’ and the governor would say, ‘Where?’” Support was scattered, fragmented, invisible. The answer, conceived within the Gates Foundation, was to consolidate it all into a single technical assistance platform through which coordinated support could flow to states.
With disarming honesty, Dr. Abba (a Doctor of Philosophy who joked about outranking his medical friends whose degrees read only “Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery,” though “once I see blood, I’ll run”) admitted he initially had no familiarity with the field’s language. “I didn’t know what zero dose was.” And the ambition was daunting: the Foundation’s history had been built on discrete interventions like polio vaccination, but improving group antenatal care, primary health care and nutrition meant working through government systems: ensuring items entered budgets and money was released. “That,” he said, “is much harder.”
He turned to what he called, with the authority of a man raised alongside twelve sisters, a proven strategy. The first person recruited was Dr. Victoria Agbara, whom he asked to “come and help me interpret all of these things” handed down by another formidable woman: the Gates Foundation’s Dr. Charity Chenge, “uncompromising when it comes to her demand for excellence.” For about eighteen months, Dr. Victoria helped build the entire institutional scaffolding: writing manuals, interviewing staff, designing logos, registering with the Corporate Affairs Commission, opening bank accounts. Then came the rigorous process that produced TAConnect’s first substantive Executive Director, Dr. Lilian Anomnachi (“who makes me proud every day”), alongside partners such as Dr. Bola Oyeledun, who worked with the team across several states.
“What all of this has proved to me,” he concluded, to warm applause, “is that whenever you have anything difficult to do, give it to a woman. Happy birthday, TAConnect. I’m very proud of you.”
