Building Nigeria’s first workforce risk intelligence platform: Lessons from the ground,
By OBI IGBOKWE
When we set out to build WellNewMe, the temptation was to call it a “wellness platform” and leave it there. Wellness is an easy sell. Everyone nods along to the idea that healthier employees are more productive employees. But somewhere in the early build, we made a decision that has shaped everything since: WellNewMe would not be a wellness app. It would be a workforce health-risk intelligence platform, closer in spirit to a credit reference agency than to a fitness tracker.
That distinction matters more than it might sound. A wellness app tells an individual how many steps they took. A risk-intelligence platform tells an employer, a broker, or an insurer something they can actually act on: where risk is concentrated in a workforce, how it is trending, and what it means for underwriting, benefits design, and cost. That is a fundamentally different product, aimed at a fundamentally different set of buyers, and it has taken real discipline to keep the platform pointed in that direction rather than drifting back toward the more familiar, more crowded “wellness” category.
Four users, one platform
One of the harder architectural lessons has been that workforce risk intelligence is not a single-user problem. WellNewMe serves four distinct constituencies – employees, employers and HR teams, brokers, and insurers – each of whom needs a different view of the same underlying data. An employee needs a personal risk picture they can trust and act on. An HR director needs an aggregated, anonymised view of organisational risk. A broker needs renewal-pipeline intelligence. An insurer needs a portfolio-level heat map and company risk profiles they can underwrite against. Building all four portals properly, on a shared data foundation, across more than eleven assessment domains, has meant resisting the urge to over-engineer. Some features we designed, including parts of the original quote-management workflow, were deliberately simplified once it became clear they were adding complexity without adding decision value. Knowing what to defer has turned out to be as important as knowing what to build.
Data sensitivity is not optional
Because the platform touches health data, we have had to be unusually careful about what we ask for and how we frame it. We recently replaced a more clinically loaded mental-health assessment with the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale, a validated, less stigmatising instrument, and we are pursuing a formal licence to use it commercially. This is the kind of decision that never shows up in a pitch deck but matters enormously to whether HR directors and, ultimately, employees trust the platform enough to engage honestly with it. Trust, in this business, is the product.
Building for two markets at once
WellNewMe operates across the UK and Nigeria simultaneously, and that has been its own education. The two markets do not share a regulatory environment, a payments landscape, or even a shared vocabulary for talking about workplace health. On the Nigerian side, we have had to think seriously about NDPR compliance, about integrating local payment rails, and about geo-detecting and localising content so that a Nigerian HR director sees a platform that speaks to their context rather than a repackaged UK product with the currency symbol changed.
We have also had to confront, directly, how thin the local evidence base is. Nigeria does not have the decades of workplace-health data that inform UK actuarial thinking. One of the more useful assets we have been able to draw on is a 2019 survey of over 6,800 Nigerian employees on workplace mental health, conducted with Dennis Ashley Medical Clinic, which we have repurposed as market evidence for exactly the kind of case we are trying to make: that Nigerian employers are operating with far less visibility into workforce health risk than their counterparts elsewhere, and that this is a gap worth closing.
What the ground teaches you
None of this has been theoretical. Being recognised as a finalist for the Royal Academy of Engineering Africa Prize was validating, but the more instructive moments have come from the unglamorous work, like auditing our own websites and finding a canonical-URL error undermining our Nigerian site’s search visibility, or discovering a jarring difference in brand voice between our UK and global pages, or simply sitting with the uncomfortable finding that our platform’s own credibility signals were weaker than they needed to be.
The lesson underneath all of these smaller lessons is the same one: building infrastructure-grade intelligence for African and UK workforces alike requires treating credibility, data integrity, and market specificity as core product features, not afterthoughts. Nigeria does not yet have a workforce-risk-intelligence category. Building it means doing the unglamorous work first, and trusting that the market will follow the evidence.
•Dr. Igbokwe is the founder of WellNewMe, a workforce health-risk intelligence platform.
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By OBI IGBOKWE When we set out to build WellNewMe, the temptation was to call it a “wellness platform” and leave it there. Wellness is an easy sell. Everyone nods along to the idea that healthier employees are more productive employees. But somewhere in the early build, we made a decision that has shaped everything since: […]
The post Building Nigeria’s first workforce risk intelligence platform: Lessons from the ground appeared first on Vanguard News.
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