Health technology is a growing theme – and opportunity – across the MEA region, so it’s perhaps little surprise that a major operator is now getting involved.
Orange Middle East and Africa and AXA CIMA (Conférence Interafricaine des Marchés d’Assurances) entities, led by AXA Assurance Maroc, a major player in its business sector, recently announced the signing of an agreement on the joint acquisition of a majority stake in DabaDoc.
DabaDoc is a platform that digitises access to healthcare in Africa. DabaDoc has developed solutions that are already used by thousands of healthcare professionals in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria.
The idea is that Orange and AXA’s investment and network will accelerate DabaDoc’s growth and extend DabaDoc’s services to other regions, in particular sub-Saharan Africa (in fact CIMA was established in 1992 to harmonise insurance regulation for a group of mainly francophone countries in sub-Saharan Africa). The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2021.
The opportunity for Orange is clear enough. Through its partnership with DabaDoc and relying on AXA’s globally recognized expertise in healthcare, Orange is positioning itself as a key player in e-health.
Following its first investment in DabaDoc in 2018, AXA Assurance Maroc says it is once again consolidating its partnership with the company to accelerate the digitisation and integration of what it calls its customers' healthcare journey. The aim is to facilitate its policyholders’ interactions with healthcare professionals, notably via DabaDoc’s appointment booking and remote consultation infrastructure and network.
As for DabaDoc itself, it hopes to benefit from the broad experience of AXA, one of the global leaders in health insurance, and Orange’s technological expertise and payment solutions to enable digital solutions to be developed that rapidly scale and benefit patients and the African healthcare ecosystem.
