Di clinic wey dey come meet you

Giwyn’s Safe Health Express is a mobile clinic that pays for its own charity. Seven months in, here is what it has done and what it has taught us.

The first call is to the head of the community. Not a flyer, not a post: a phone call, to explain what is coming and to agree a day. On that day a white van pulls up in a part of Lagos where the nearest clinic is a long and expensive trip away, and by the time the doors open there is already a queue.

The Safe Health Express, SHE for short, belongs to Giwyn. Inside are a doctor, a nurse and a lab technician, an examination bed behind a privacy screen, blood pressure monitors and glucometers, scales, thermometers, sample kits, a first-aid cabinet and a stock of things people need and cannot always get: sanitary pads, condoms, emergency contraception, malaria treatment, oral rehydration salts, wound dressings, painkillers. Over a single eight-hour visit it can check your blood pressure, your blood sugar, your weight, your eyes and your teeth, screen you for HIV and hepatitis, test for pregnancy, screen for breast and cervical cancer, vaccinate you and sit you down with someone who will listen.

A clinic that pays for its self

What makes SHE different from the mobile clinics most of us have seen is how it is paid for. It is a social enterprise. Schools and companies book the van and pay for health packages for their pupils and staff, and the income from those bookings funds free care for women and girls who could not otherwise afford it. Since the start of the year nine institutions in Lagos, five schools and four companies, have paid for SHE’s services, and every one of those contracts buys another day in a community that will never be invoiced.

This matters for a reason anyone who runs a women’s organisation in Nigeria will recognise. Grants end. Donor priorities move. A service that exists only as long as a funder is interested is a service that women learn not to rely on. SHE was incubated with support from the Fòs Feminista Innovation and Social Enterprise Lab from December 2025, and that support paid for the refurbished van, the equipment, the pricing tools and the customer feedback system. It was spent on building something that can keep running once the support ends.

Seven months

Between January and July 2026 the van provided 13,954 sexual and reproductive health services against a target of 9,700: contraceptive supplies, counselling, referrals and training. It distributed 10,213 contraceptives, mostly emergency pills and male condoms, against a target of 7,600. Alongside those it ran around three thousand general health checks (blood pressure, blood sugar and body mass) for over a thousand individual people, and eight workshops on adolescent girls’ health, gender-based violence and sexuality education.

The number we watch most closely is not one of those. It is the answer to a single question we ask people after they have been seen: would you recommend this to someone you know? At the midpoint, three in four said they would actively recommend it, and nobody said they would warn a friend off. For a clinic that arrives in a van, in a country where trust in health services is hard-earned, that is the figure that tells us whether we will be welcome next time.

What went wrong, and what we did

Two things have tested the model so far. Neither was medical.

Rain. This year’s rainy season flooded roads to several of the places the van was due to go, and a mobile clinic that cannot reach its stop has failed the people who queued. The team now works from the weekly forecast and moves outreach days rather than cancelling them.

Success. At some stops more people turned up than the team could see. The answer has been unglamorous and effective: an advance visit to estimate numbers, a structured schedule for the day, and grouping people on arrival by the service they have come for, so that nobody waits two hours to be told the nurse could have seen them in ten minutes. Staffing and supplies are now planned stop by stop rather than assumed.

Some of that came from outside. SHE took part in an exchange with organisations running mobile health units in Kenya, Uganda, Bolivia and Belize, and the scheduling and mapping practice owes something to what colleagues there had already learned the hard way.

One woman in Isolo

Numbers are how we report; they are not why the van exists. Ijeoma Egwuatu, Giwyn’s Advocacy and Communications Director, tells this story from an outreach in the Isolo area of Lagos.

“A young woman, around twenty-seven, came for a consultation. Her vitals were checked and she saw the doctor, who told her that her blood sugar was high and that she needed a nutritionist to guide what she ate. She was hesitant at first. I think she assumed there would be no remedy, that this was simply news she would have to carry. She spoke with the doctor, then with the nutritionist, who worked through a meal plan with her, and by the time she left she was visibly happy.

“It struck me because she had not come about her blood sugar. She had come because the van was there. Reproductive healthcare for a woman or a girl should be a single continuum, not a set of separate doors, and that day was the reason Safe Health Express exists: accessible, holistic, non-judgemental care, built on trust.”

That is the case for the van in one paragraph. A woman who would not have made the journey to a clinic walked to the end of her street and left with something she can use.

What comes next

The van is one vehicle in one city. The model, a mobile clinic that earns its way and spends its surplus on the women least able to pay, is not tied to Lagos, and Alliance partners in other cities and countries are already asking what it would take to run one. The honest answer is a van, a small clinical team, two or three institutional clients who will pay for a good service and a community leader who will take the first call.

If you are a school or an employer in Lagos, you can book the van. If you fund women’s health, this is a service with a business model, seven months of data and a waiting list of communities. Either way, write to us.