AUGUST PRIME PARAGON: PHARM BISI BRIGHT

In commemoration of the World Humanitarian Day, we had a chat with Pharm Bisi Bright, a woman who gives life to livers through her initiative, LiveWell Initiative (LWI). She is the founder of Women in Hepatitis Africa (WIHA) and the CEO, LiveWell Initiative (LWI). From LWI to FIP (International Pharmaceutical Federation), Pharm Bright has distinguished herself as an invaluable asset in public health, pharmacy education and development. She is such an inspiration to young pharmacists. We hope you get inspired through her interview.

PSN-YPG Lagos: Thank you, ma for the opportunity to interview you. May we meet you?
Pharm Bisi Bright: My name is Bisi Bright. I am the 1st Vice Chairman/CEO of LiveWell Initiative LWI and Founder of Women in Hepatitis Africa WIHA. I am a pharmacist, public health practitioner, a practice academician and a lecturer. Thank you for the privilege too.

PSN-YPG Lagos: It’s nice to meet you, ma. The World Humanitarian Day was celebrated on the 19th of August. Could you share a few words about service to humanity?
Pharm Bisi Bright: Thank you. The World Humanitarian Day, marked on the 19th of August every year, is usually dedicated to humanitarians — people who work in the field of charity. More emphasis is given to people who are suffering as a result of their service to humanity. In fact, the World Humanitarian Day used to be marked in commemoration of people who had gone to war and had become victims, displaced etc. But, today, the scope has been expanded and you find a lot of humanitarian services interwoven with philanthropic services. For example, we are in the days of COVID’19 and a prominent part of COVID’19 response is the medical response. There is what we call the COVID resilience which is the humanitarian aspect of COVID-19 response, where as a result of the lockdowns and the incapacitated economies, countries started giving out meals to citizens. In a country like Nigeria where the government has not been able to reach every poor citizen, we find that the philanthropic sector has to fill in those gaps. The World Humanitarian Day covers a very broad spectrum ranging from the actual people who deliver humanitarian services to the real people who have humanitarian needs. My view of the celebration of the World Humanitarian Day, is that it is a totality of the celebration of humanity. And at this time of the COVID’19 pandemic, COVID resilience is the way to celebrate the World Humanitarian Day by giving out food and other basic support to communities, apart from giving out the necessary healthcare.

PSN-YPG Lagos: Prior to the pandemic, health workers were not appreciated enough for their humanitarian service. Today, the world over, health workers are national and international heroes. Can you say a few words on this?
Pharm Bisi Bright: Healthcare is a commodity which people don’t really think about consciously. They only think of it when they need it and once that need is taken care of, it’s all forgotten, so healthcare workers are generally regarded as “matters” all over the world because they’re not really appreciated. Matters are people that offer services that are sacrificial and they’re not really rewarded for such services. I think that’s why a healthcare worker is expected to take an oath, prior to going to the field because it is a field that involves a lot of sacrifice. Yes, it is true that in these days of COVID, healthcare workers are better appreciated and that’s because, this is a global thing. Everywhere in the world, people have realized that health should really come first. I’m sure the politicians here in Nigeria are regretting that they did not invest in health. Health is one of those commodities that are very essential but not well appreciated, so I will not be surprised, for example, if post-COVID, people go back to their old attitude towards health. I do hope that our politicians in this country will look at it differently and start investing in health.

PSN-YPG Lagos: A common perspective to humanitarian services is a service whose reward is in heaven. How rewarding is service to humanity? At least, on earth.
Pharm Bisi Bright: The truth is that if I want to serve humanity, I should do it selflessly and I believe that every human being owes humanity some service. In my opinion, service to humanity should come naturally and it is an expectation of every human being. Every human being should be his or her brother’s keeper and every human being should be willing to serve humanity. I think service to humanity is a moral mandate on every human being. Having said that, how rewarding is it? I would say it is extremely rewarding if you do understand it from the perspective that it is a mandate, it is an expectation of you, you are expected to serve humanity, you should be your brother’s keeper. You find out that if you serve humanity, you’ll find a lot of reward in it. If you ask the question, ‘How lucrative?’, I may not be able to answer that, because service to humanity may not necessarily be lucrative. It may not be financially rewarding but financial reward is not the only kind of reward that human beings need. It builds a lot of network around you, it makes you feel some sense of contentment and joy in planting a smile on others’ faces. It also comes back to you, that’s just the truth. If you sow into humanity, it will come back to you even through your generations unborn – it is highly rewarding. I will use the example of what we do at the Livewell Initiative. People ask me, “How do you reward your volunteers? They all seem so happy, they all seem so content and they all seem so willing to work.” The truth is that the humanity in them comes out. There is a bit of humanity in every man, and so the humanity in you comes out when you engage in humanitarian service and that makes you very rewarded. If you are a very spiritual person, you would also understand that there is a spiritual gain in it because your spirit, your soul, is at peace because you’re adding value to human lives. It is a very rewarding enterprise to go into humanitarian services.

PSN-YPG Lagos: That’s something we all need to hold on to. Of a truth, we should be our brother’s keeper. Ma, The Livewell Initiative was founded in 2007, and we know the Livewell initiative has in no small way provided many humanitarian services. What inspired the initiative and what has been its driving force since inception?
Pharm Bisi Bright: What really inspired the livewell initiative was that a few things were happening and they were all related to avoidable deaths happening around me, at that time. My friend’s 44-year old engineer sister died because she had a heart disease and she had a heart attack. She was not on aspirin and her family was threatening to sue her cardiologist for not placing her on aspirin. Also, there was a conference in Washington DC in 2004 where I met the Professor Yunus who changed Bangladesh by taking away poverty. He started by taking money to beggars at the roadside. For example, giving ten thousand naira to a beggar to trade with, instead of begging, and to start paying back in 3 months’ time. He didn’t give it to them as a free gift because they wouldn’t appreciate it. He gave them a period of leave when they could rest and start paying after three months. He was able to change Bangladesh which was the poorest country in the world at that time. His impact was so great; he was invited to Washington DC to deliver a lecture at the World Health Congress in 2004. I met him at that conference, he was a keynote speaker and I was just an attendee. That year, I had the luck of being sponsored by the New York Times to attend that conference. Because I was a sponsored delegate, I had access to the speakers. So, my first question to Professor Yunus when I had the privilege of meeting him was to find out how he was able to manage that and what plans he had for health. It was a global health conference and they had brought him to talk about his micro-credit summit campaign, so that they could replicate it in healthcare. He spoke about the Grameen health program which was about to launch in Bangladesh and in other countries. After meeting him, I was really impressed and we started communicating. He wanted me to start something similar in Nigeria. He wanted to establish his branch in Nigeria and he wanted me to be their person on the ground. We kept in touch, however I was still working full-time at that time. He linked me up with the Ghana rep. In the 2006, when I had left full-time work, I started considering taking up his proposition and I started working very hard towards it. I designed a poverty-related health program for them which I named The Illness Poverty Alleviation Programme and we started talking. But I found out that because it was going to be an NGO, I would need to register the name, register an office and so on. So, while I was still brainstorming with one of my children on how to go about this, the young man said, “Mummy, why don’t you start your own thing? Afterall, you will need to register a name, you need to register the products, programs and everything. Come to think of it, the only programme you have for now is yours. You’re taking that program into that organization and you’re going to lose it, it will become theirs. So, why don’t you start off your own thing and start with a single program? It will be yours and you can go through all the hassle. If you’re registering a name, you know that you’re registering your own company and so on”. So, it was just like a joke but that’s how it started. And I decided to write to the Prof that I won’t be able to take on their proposition because I decided I would rather go with my program since it was mine. That was how we started with Livewell initiative and gave it a name. I gave it the name Bonne Sante, but my son said, “Nigerians will change the name entirely”, because Bonne Sante means Good health in French. Then he said, “Why not Live well or Living well?”. I added the word ‘initiative’ and that’s how we started. The first program we had was the Illness Poverty Alleviation Program which was the program I had designed for those people and that’s why we started. We ran our programs for a whole year before we launched officially at the Muson Centre in 2007. The driving force for Livewell initiative since its inception has just been innovation for sustainability. From day one, we had innovation as our key word, and then we have always rewarded innovation. We decided we wanted to do something different from what was out there in the space and this has been our driving force. Of course, we also believe in due process and our core values are transparency, accountability and ethics. So, anything that is done by Livewell initiative is ethically done, it’s transparent, we are always accountable, our books are being checked regularly. We have audited accounts, very updated. Anybody can inspect our accounts. The key word is innovation for sustainability.

PSN-YPG Lagos: Thank you ma, for this. This in itself would inspire many more to join in contributing their quota to humanity. LWI, according to its website, has empowered over 1.5 million Nigerians and 5000 Ghanaians, including 60 blind and disabled people. What is the place of the government in aiding Non-governmental organizations in achieving their vision as regards humanitarian services?
Pharm Bisi Bright: Thank you.
Yes, as regards the impact of Livewell initiative, I think what you saw on our website was a bit backdated, because we’ve had a few challenges. In fact, since 2018 we’ve not been able to update our website regularly. We concentrated more on our twitter handles and so on. We’ve got to a stage where we need a website with infinite number of pages. We are working towards that; we’ve not been able to procure that. The updated figures are 1.9 million people including over 400 visually impaired and disabled persons, and we’ve impacted over 6000 citizens from 18 African countries. That’s through one of our subsidiaries. The word ‘blind’ is no longer really used. It’s described as a bit rude, too blunt! So, we use the words ‘visually impaired' and ‘disabled' people. I know we put ‘blind’, that was many years ago when we didn’t know.
Now, to answer your question on what the place of government is in aiding NGOs in achieving their vision, we’ve been able to do all this work because we are a self-funded nonprofit, because we found that if you’re a funded nonprofit, you start off with a honeymoon and end up crashing. That’s what happens to most NGOs that are donor-funded, because when a donor funds you, there is compulsorily a weaning period. It’s like a mother breastfeeding her baby, she must wean the baby after a while. Once the weaning period sets in, which is that halfway mark, the NGO has to start funding the same program. At the halfway mark, the donor starts to withdraw funding gradually till you get to the zero mark. I don’t want to mention names, but there was one very big NGO in Nigeria a few years ago that had branches in up to 30 states in the country, so they almost had a physical presence in every state of the federation but they were donor funded and they were getting their funds regularly. But when they got to the halfway mark, they had to bid again to continue the project. Unfortunately they lost the bid, somebody else got the bid, and they could not continue the funding. The first thing that happened to them was that their offices started disappearing, we just noticed that their offices were being closed down, and then the big head office they had along a very popular road in Lagos had to shut down and then they were fully shut down. So, if an NGO is donor-funded, it is good for them at the beginning but it is bad for them at the end. Now, if an NGO is not donor-funded but self-funded, it is a bit rough at the beginning but it would become stable later. We are not donor-funded, we are self-funded and we generate our income internally. Because of that, we don’t really worry about whether the government funds us or not, because if an NGO is donor-funded, whether through government funding or external person funding, funding is funding. And it’s like just pampering the child and not sending him to school. When that child gets old, that child will be an illiterate, so the child will suffer in the end. Our own way of looking at it is this: we don’t like the idea of donor funding and we got that policy from one of our directors who joined us from day one. She is a Swiss citizen, a pharmacist, Dr. Aghatueli of the FIP Pharma Bridge. She just gave me a three worded clause – shun donor funds. And I said, “How will I shun donor funds? How will I run the organization? She said, “You design new things, you have to work it out and start with the word ‘innovation’ ”. We found out that if you’re innovative and you say or do something differently, people would want to look at you. It draws attention when you’re doing it differently. So, because we have been able to shun donor funds, we have been able to go very far. Having said that, when we hit our 10-year mark, (we are 13 years old now), we decided that we were strong enough to work with donor funds and we had a lot of subsidiaries by then. So, when we turned 10 years in 2017, we launched the Women with Hepatitis in Africa which is our biggest subsidiary. We have other subsidiaries: Livewell Academy, LWI Green, which is our programme for farmers, we have LWI Bay, which is our sick bay programme – we run sick bays and heath posts. We have quite a number of subsidiaries, but the Women in Hepatitis Africa is a bit different. We wanted it to be donor-funded, we wanted to experiment with the idea of donor funding, so we launched the Women in Hepatitis Africa, and we said all our hepatitis programme will be donor funded under that subsidiary. But, we found out that to be donor funded, it was difficult, although women in Hepatitis Africa which we wanted to be donor funded is self-funded by us. However, we ran one or two liver conferences that were donor funded and so were able to experiment with donor funding and we found out that what they said is true. We found out that our liver programmes we don’t run it unless we have a donor, so you find out that if your programme is donor funded, if you don’t have a donor, that programme will be dead. The liver conference has the Livewell initiative as its parent, Livewell will not allow its conference to die. The liver conference takes place one every year, we have run three now and we hope to run another one next year. As for government we work very well with government and with inter-governmental organizations and development partners. Don’t fund us, we run our programmes, when we design we call them in to partner with us to endorse, they come in as endorsing partners and the government endorses all our programmes but they’ve never funded us for anything, right from the grassroots initiative we are running in Lagos state to the programmes we’ve run with the federal government, every programme we run, we make sure the government is aware and there is a government representative. We do that to ensure that the necessary endorsement. But, government doesn’t fund us. I would say that NGOS that are really serious minded should not be government funded, if you’re filling the gap for government why are you waiting for the government to fund it. You fill that gap and then government can take over it later or you run it together with the government later – like we are running a health post with the government in Makoko in partnership with the Lagos State Primary Health Care Board, and we have all the endorsement and partnership we need, even though it’s not funded, the relationship is graduating gradually and the government is providing the vaccines for the immunization days, and we are hopeful that someday they will provide some implements for us. So I think the bottoms-up approach is much better than saying the government should bring funds or we won’t work.

PSN-YPG Lagos: Ma, are volunteers lacking in numbers? And what other challenges exist in rendering services to Humanity, and how can we nip them in the bud.
PHARM BISI BRIGHT: Thank you, as regards volunteers we have more than we need. Right now, we are over 800 in number in Live well initiative. Since last year we had to kind of curtail taking new volunteers because we found out that we had too many volunteers, we were hitting the 1000 mark, and when I say 800+ I have not even included the new volunteers that joined us between 2018 and now, outside Nigeria in Ghana in the U.S. in the UK and so on. We have quite a lot of volunteers, people they say they want to join and we have not assessed their membership. The reason why we decided to put a bit of a clampdown is because we found out that it would be overwhelming if we grew out of shape. So, we wanted to keep it in check that's why we are where we are now. We have about an average of about 850 volunteers of which almost 100 and medical doctors and among the hundred or so medical doctors we have 30 of them eye specialists in different fields of medicine. For pharmacists they are over 120 and about 80 nurses and most of the other people are social scientists or basic science graduates but we have one or two lawyers and Engineers. So we have volunteers from across the different professions. The highest number professions are the public health professionals and are over 200 and we have the older ones and the younger ones and we have so many of them. So we don't have a lack of volunteers at all we have more than enough volunteers

However, when you serve humanity, you always have challenges. One of the reasons why our number of volunteers is growing is because we don't impress it on anyone to come for any program. We make people operate on a free scale; it's like you can just glide at your own speed within the Livewell initiative. We have some volunteers that have not been active for over 2 years we have some that are very active all the time and we have some that are very active in the first five years in live well and they became dormant either because they're pushing their career or whatever. We do understand that we don't mind and we move with each person according to their pace each member love live well initiative is a very important member of the team to us and we don't joke with anybody, we don't take anyone for granted and I think that has helped us a lot. However, the major challenge we have faced as an organization is the financial challenge, but it does not really bother me much anymore because I have found out that even the richest companies in the world also have a financial challenge. we are non-profit even the richest for profit have a financial challenge; they're looking at their figures they are looking at the profit margins, they want to up the margins they're scared of crashing and so on so we being midstream keeping the pace midstream like a tortoise moving slowly but surely knowing that we are going to end up very well and that and that end we pray will never come because the way live well initiative is designed to go from generations to generations it is designed we have the kind of memorandum articles or organization that is similar to Kaiser Permanente similar to Mayo clinic and so on. It is an organization that is designed to outlive the founder and live on forever and we hope it will be going in the middle stream. Apart from the financial challenge, we have HR challenges where personnel misbehave and when they do we have a way of cautioning them. We have a group head of human resources and things like discipline take place in Live well initiative even though it is a voluntary organization. We discipline people who go out of the line because we have a brand to protect. We run and induction program for every live well initiative irrespective of your profession you have to come in for an induction and that's when you become a full member. We have our value system and everybody in live well understands what the value system is and if you don't believe in our values of transparency accountability and ethics then you can't even be one of us. We usually allow people to come in and observe us before the join us so if you don't like what are doing you don't have to join us. Apart from the HR challenge which is discipline - I would say we're good on that. We usually overcome financial challenges by designing our programs in a very innovative way and designing also the funding pattern for the program. So, we may design something very innovative take it to the corporate world and tell them to give us an honorarium which they usually do and that honorarium which we got from the corporate world, we can use it to go to a village and do free health for that village and that's that will design our programs. It works for us and it's a win-win for everybody. So, I would say that most of our challenges, we’ve been able to nip them in the bud. There are a few challenges that are not particular to everybody but peculiar to live well initiative. I'll give one example: we have vehicles – our buses, because the volunteers are all youths, I’m always faced with the challenge of young men or women were trying to learn to drive and the used the LWI vehicle and they crashed the vehicle and it costs us colossal sum of money to repair the vehicle and that is one of the Challenges we’ve still not be able to overcome because the offenders people who are very hard-working very innovative, you know the devil has a way of pushing people, who tells then this is a free vehicle why not learn to drive with it. We are trying to work on that initially anyone that drives the official vehicle will be dismissed instantly but you don't want to lose a good-hearted volunteer rather you want to reprimand and look for other ways to punish them so that is one of the ways of challenges. But on the whole, we are doing well, and like the eagle we are actually surmounting our challenges and we're getting stronger by the day and by the year.
To avoid any ambiguity, anyone who wants to volunteer in Livewell initiative can join us but they would need to wait a bit before we process their membership. However, there's a shortcut for young pharmacists and young pharmacy students. We have the Agatueli mentoring chair. Remember, Dr. Agatueli is the LWI Director that told me to shun donor funds. She has just retired from our board, we have a different European citizen sitting on her board now who replaced Dr. Agatueli but to honour Agatueli even before she retired in 2015 in Germany at the FIP, we launched the Agatueli mentoring chair, which is a chair that mentors young pharmacists as well as pharmacy students is called the AWMC and the people who are running it and are very young pharmacists so that's a lot of innovation would come in. So for young pharmacists or pharmacy students who wish to join Live Well initiative, they can link up through the Agatueli mentoring chair and they can get into LWI through that. We run the AWMC as a separate entity, so they can join the AWMC where we give them a mentor who could be abroad, and we could give you a mentor from anywhere in the world, but will be a pharmacist and then through that, you can also join the LWI programs. The AWMC is a subsidiary of Live Well, so for young pharmacists and young pharmacy students, we are taking in volunteers through the AWMC and we are actually expanding the AWMC but that would probably be at the tail end of this year at our year-end event, we would announce that. So, I hope people who want to be volunteers will not be discouraged by what I said about not taking new volunteers. We are still giving out volunteer forms but it will take a little longer time to process the application of a new volunteer that is not a pharmacist. But if it's a pharmacist, under the AWMC, the person can join into the mainstream organization later. Another way to join us fast-tracked is by joining the Women in Hepatitis Africa because they are also taking on volunteers and the Women in Hepatitis Africa actually has volunteers from over 18 different countries around the world.
Just a few names to help those who are interested in the Agatueli mentoring program, there is Yimika Karounwi at National Igbobi Hospital, she's one of the mentoring liaison officers, there’s Setofunmi Alo who is a past pans president, he's one of the mentoring officers and we also have Sylvester Adeyemi and Mfon Ekong; there quite a few of them, please link up with any of the three or four I’ve mentioned, they tell you who the liaison officers are. There is also Chigoziem, because we are also looking at geographical distribution. Chigoziem was in Benin, you will get his number from the other liaison officers. Thank you.

PSN-YPG Lagos: This is great! I trust young Pharmacists would love to be a part of this! Ma, any other thing on humanitarian services you would like to share with us ma. On a final note...
PHARM BISI BRIGHT: Thank you PSN-YPG Lagos, so on a final note, I just like to round up by saying that giving humanitarian services is a very rewarding thing to do and if you give it will come back to you. Always remember that! Everybody should remember that if you give it will come back to you and that it is never too late to start to be a humanitarian person. I also want to advise us that if you’re doing something in line with a humanitarian gesture you should not expect your reward immediately. I know you asked that question earlier and some would say the reward is in heaven. I do believe you should do it for God or do it for posterity, and posterity will reward. Posterity may not even reward the doer immediately; it might be through some descendants. It doesn't matter but we would do it because each human being should be there for the other; each person should be his or her brother's keeper. I wish to focus on people who are in the for-profit sector, that even if you're in a for-profit business you must make out some time, energy and money to give back to humanity by engaging in a humanitarian service. In the corporate world, it is morally wrong for any corporate organization not to do some humanitarian work. I hope that message will also go out to profiteers to give back to humanity. Thank you very much.

PSN-YPG Lagos: Thank you so much ma for your time. It was a great session indeed. Living for humanity should be our principle, being our brother’s keeper like you’ve said and giving back to the society. Thank you ma, we appreciate the privilege.
PHARM BISI BRIGHT: Thank you, PSN-YPG Lagos and every member of your team. I do not take it for granted and I appreciate it. I wish you all great success in your careers and endeavors. God bless you.