The pioneer Incubation Manager who set up TAConnect’s earliest systems returned to witness what the organization has become, and what it means for Nigerian women.

“It’s not often that you see a seed that you planted grow to become such an oak.” With that image, Dr. Victoria Agbara, the pioneer Incubation Manager who built TAConnect’s foundations, captured what the fifth anniversary meant to the people who were there at the very beginning.

Standing on existing protocol, Dr. Agbara took the audience back to the earliest days, when “everything was in flux” and chaos was the operating environment. What made the difference, she recalled, were wonderful partners and “a brilliant blueprint”: the Gates Foundation had contracted partners (among them Solina, CHAI and HSDF) to draw up the roadmap the founding team then set out to implement. She also paid tribute to early state champions, recalling that as TAConnect began its Group Antenatal Care work in Kaduna and Kano States, Dr. Tijani, present earlier at the anniversary event, was “immensely helpful” in opening the doors to state-level collaboration.

Then history intervened. “We started TAConnect just as COVID hit,” she said. Barely two months into her role at DAI, the country entered lockdown, and for roughly the next eight months the work of standing up a new institution happened almost entirely online. “Somehow, miraculously, we managed to do that and still managed to reach people in the communities.”

The most powerful moment of her reflection came from the present, not the past. Just a day before the anniversary, she had joined a meeting with WCA and heard firsthand how far the work she helped start has expanded, from TAConnect’s original mandate to a portfolio now spanning multiple innovations, including E-MOTIVE. “To know that this is having an impact at the end of the day on our women, saving lives, that is enough to make me proud,” she said, thanking Dr. Lilian Anomnachi and her team for their “immense and tremendous work.”