Usman Dalhatu, a 20-year-old mechanical engineer student at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria, invented and built a local ventilator. At the time of building the invention – his country – Nigeria reportedly had just 500 ventilators across its 36 states. In partnership with other Nigerian innovators, Dalhatu, 20, built a local ventilator, which he later transformed into a portable ultra-modern E-vent automatic ventilator. Dalhatu named the equipment RESPIRE-19. He collaborated with Dr. Yunusa Muhammad Garba of the Human Anatomy Department, Gombe State University and Aliyu Hassan, a graduate of Mechatronics Engineering.
Last summer I gathered over a dozen womxn of color startup founders and small business owners to connect in Seattle, Washington. We shared our backgrounds, experiences, expertise, challenges and successes as a collective given the historical and systematic exclusion in the business ecosystem. We bonded on our common experience of being ‘the only’, steadily pioneering our own industries. We would have never thought that six months later the world would be facing a global health crisis and we’d be scrambling to secure funding to survive. On average, womxn of color
