Women of Rubies
In Interviews&profile By

PROFILE| MEET TEMIE GIWA-TUBOSUN, FOUNDER OF LIFEBANK

Temie Giwa-Tubosun (born Oluwaloni Olamide Giwa, 4 December 1985) is a Nigerian-American Health Manager, Founder of LifeBank (formerly One Percent Project), a business enterprise in Nigeria working to improve access to blood transfusions in the country.

Temie was born in Ila Orangun, Osun State, Nigeria to a university professor and school teacher. She is the fourth of six children. Her name “Temie” came from the abridging of “Temitope”, one of her birth names.

She grew up in Ila, Ilesha, and in Ibadan until she was fifteen. When she was ten, her parents won the US Diversity Immigrant Visa and left for the United States with the three older siblings. In 2001, at fifteen, she left to join them with her two younger siblings.

Temie attended Osseo Senior High School, Minnesota, and graduated in 2003. She then attended the Minnesota State University Moorhead and graduated in 2007. In 2008, she went to graduate school at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey from where she graduated in July 2010.

In January 2010, she went for a graduate fellowship at the World Health Organisation in Geneva, Switzerland, which lasted till July of that year when she graduated Middlebury Institute of International Studies Monterey.

She worked briefly at Fairview Health Services in Minnesota in 2010.

In January 2016, Temie founded LifeBank, a business organisation set up to tackle the problem of blood shortage in Nigeria. The founding was inspired by the birth of her first child and the complications from that experience. The technology and logistics company is based in Lagos, and incubated at Co-Creation Hub in Yaba. As at January 2017, the company has helped deliver over 2000 pints of blood to patients across the state.

On August 31, 2016, she met with Mark Zuckerberg during his first visit to Nigeria. She was one of the two women Zuckerberg referenced in his town hall meeting the next day. Of her work, Zuckerberg had said,

“If everyone had the opportunity to build something like this, then the world would be a better place… I’ve been to a lot of different cities… people around the world are trying to build stuff like that. If she actually pulls it off, then she’d show a model that will impact not just Lagos, not just Nigeria, but countries all around the world.”

Of the meeting, Temie said to Quartz, “Mark’s visit is validation for years of work and everything we’re trying to do.”

Related Posts

Comments are closed.