“There were two key lessons I learned in Burundi: fail fast, and persevere. Within three months of our launch we had completely failed in our idea for nurse entrepreneurs. The government regulations significantly restricted innovation in the delivery platform and many of the local nurses had much lower levels of education than we ever imagined. But we failed fast and learned faster. Within a few weeks we had another pilot launched focused on franchising existing clinics and a few months later launched our final major pilot that further honed our idea to focus on faith-based clinics, which were strategically significant in the country.

Our final model was a conversion franchise for faith-based clinics. That means, we took existing clinics and incorporated them into our franchise network to deliver nursing and businesses education, quality control, and medicine supply.”

Jonathan is now a 2nd year MBA student at Darden at the University of Virginia. Recently, he was interviewed by the Darden school newspaper. “Fail fast and learn faster:” a key lesson for Jonathan and a core value of LifeNet. We iterated our model for years before we hit on what works, creating sustainable impact on the quality of healthcare at scale.

You can read more of his interview here.