Adebayo nearly died when he was given fake medicine as a child.
Since then, he's tried to make sure that doesn't happen to others.
He's invented a simple device to spot fake drugs.
It gave me a mission. Deciding I was going to be a pharmacist.
Deciding I was going to build something
to make sure that nobody else has to go through my trauma.
People Fixing the World. Spotting fake drugs.
A consignment of illegal medicines is seized by customs.
It's a global trade worth $200 billion
which leads to hundreds of thousands of deaths every year.
In Africa, specifically, it's very acute.
In many countries between 30 to 50% of the medicine supply chain
is actually counterfeit and substandard to an extent.
Adebayo was 15 when he was given fake drugs for a lung condition.
I had taken a dose that night. And I didn't wake up the next morning.
I was in intensive care for over three weeks.
I spent another, close to two or three months recovering.
And I still live with some of the healthcare condition
from almost losing my life from something as trivial as a medicine.
After that experience, he decided he was going to study pharmacy.
So I was very angry and I really wanted to make a change.
And that anger is what turned into a sense of purpose and mission for me
that has kept me focused over the last 15-plus years.
Now he's designed this portable scanner that tests if a drug is real.
It uses light to analyse each pill's unique ingredients.
The process is called spectrophotometry.
Connect it to the app and tell it what the drug is supposed to be
and in a few seconds it'll tell you if it matches.
And the test result is out. It's a match.
The AI has confirmed that it is M&B paracetemol.
It can also identify some unknown pills and liquids.
from its database of over 200 drugs.
At $100 a month though it's mainly aimed at professionals.
But Adebayo thinks it could help in places like this market.
It makes me sad that we have medicines being stored improperly
and handled not in the right manner.
Yeh. There's lots of medicines for example.
People get medicines from markets because they can be cheaper.
Sometimes you end up with bad medicines.
Sometimes you end up with falsified medicines.
You can be lucky today and unlucky tomorrow.
And I was the unlucky one. I ended up with something
that probably came from somewhere like here
that almost killed me.
Other solutions validate medicines by using packaging or barcodes.
Adebayo hopes his solution can improve the whole supply chain.
My hope is that across Africa
more and more hospitals, pharmacies, pharmaceutical wholesalers
will be able to authenticate the quality of their medicines.
So that only the highest quality medicines eventually end up
in the hands of patients no matter where they are.