"The reality is that over 52% of the world still lacks access to basic healthcare, and while we see innovations in cities, rural areas remain forgotten. Our mission is to bring affordable medicines and health education to those who need it most." — Edward Booty, Founder of reach52
"You can absolutely build a company that’s both impactful and profitable. Making good margins doesn’t mean you compromise on the mission—it just means you’re sustainable enough to scale and keep delivering real change." — Edward Booty, Founder of reach52
"Once you’ve seen the injustice of people unable to afford life-saving medicine, you can’t unsee it. That drives everything we do, because we know every small step forward can save lives and create lasting impact." — Edward Booty, Founder of reach52
Edward Booty, Founder of reach52, and Jeremy Au discussed:
1. Health Access For 6M Lives: Edward Booty, CEO of reach52, shared how the company addresses healthcare gaps in rural and underserved regions across Asia and Africa. Initially conceptualized during Edward’s travels in India, reach52 shifted from a tech-heavy model reliant on shared kiosks to a comprehensive platform empowering local health workers. The organization uses data-driven tools to map community health needs and deliver targeted interventions, improving access to essential medicines and education. By 2023, reach52 had impacted over 6 million lives across seven countries, aiming to expand further into Africa due to extreme medication price disparities—sometimes 30 times higher than in the UK.
2. reach52 Business Model: Edward detailed the complexities of balancing impact and profitability as a social enterprise. reach52 operates on dual funding—corporate sponsorships and distribution margins from affordable medicines. He highlighted systemic challenges like fragmented impact measurement frameworks and vested interests in rural markets, which can hinder scale. Edward underscored the importance of embracing market complexities, such as regulatory engagement and supply chain management, to achieve scalable impact without diluting the mission.
3. Social Enterprise Perceptions: The conversation explored how perceptions of social enterprises have evolved over the past decade. While “social business” was trendy in the 2010s, health equity has become the focal point in global discourse. Edward reflected on navigating fluctuating funding priorities, avoiding inauthentic rebranding to chase trends, and staying committed to Reach 52's mission of health access for underserved communities.
They also discussed the role of training in empowering unpaid health workers, collaborative models with governments and NGOs to scale local health solutions and the economic impact of health expenditures on poverty in rural regions.
[00:00:00] Jeremy Au: Hey Ed, really excited to have you on the show because you are tackling such an important problem which is a global healthcare access gap across low and middle income countries. So could you share a little bit by yourself, Ed?
[00:00:12] Edward Booty: Oh, yeah. Hi, everyone. And thank you for having me, Jeremy. I'm Edward Booty.
Yeah, I'm founder and CEO of a social enterprise called Reach 52. We focus on healthcare access, which means access to medicines and health services in emerging markets across Asia and more recently, Africa as well.
[00:00:29] Jeremy Au: I know you're doing such an important problem, which is, providing healthcare services to, billions of people across the world.
But how did you get started? Did you know what you're going to do back in London School of Economics as an undergrad?
[00:00:43] Edward Booty: Yeah, so I'm from the UK, as you can probably hear, been over in Singapore for about eight years building this company. Yeah, when I left university, traveled around India, actually, and I decided to not work straight away.
Went to, most, northeast, southwest of India, saw a lot of people. Without basic health care access, found that a bit of a shock volunteered at some NGOs, but I didn't really like it, it felt not business y, on the periphery of like a mainstream society, if you will, like a little side charity project, something like this, so I saw a lot of health access issues.
Got a bit of a shock in India, didn't really the NGO sector, didn't really feel it was going to move the needle. Ended up with an internship in a big pharma company who was trying to sell affordable medicines in rural areas. They were willing to Lower their margins. They were willing to, actually try and access these harder to reach markets.
But it's just so hard, small distributors, small suppliers, they can't get comfortable with credit risk, potentially getting paid compliance quality. There's limited demand for products. So you know, you have this big, global, multinational company willing to try and help. And just facing way more obstacles than if they just did normal commercial work, such as selling to big pharmacies, big hospitals and cities and so on.
So yeah, I saw that first hand when I was 21 had the idea for H52 when I was 21. The idea was to just build a platform whereby we can be a credible partner to access, give access to affordable medicines. And also build demand for those medicines because often just, having a nutritional on the shelf or a diabetes product on the shelf of a pharmacy.
It doesn't mean it gets used unless you know your kid is malnourished or you have diabetes. So you need to do education, screening, access to doctors which, of course builds, product category demand as well. So yeah, saw that firsthand didn't have any money. I've still got the original pitch deck from Route 52, the original two pager, which I actually looked at recently.
For some, for different reasons, but fascinating to see it because it was just an idea I had when I was 21 and put some slides together for I then worked in consulting, saving up money the whole time, building the website on the weekends, set up the, email, started pitching people for the concept.
And yeah, eventually had enough traction that I left my job, one way flight to Singapore, set up the company. Not quite what we planned in terms of the first, version of the model, if you will. But yeah, rest is history,
[00:03:10] Jeremy Au: so what's the difference between the first version of your model versus, you 52 is today?
[00:03:15] Edward Booty: Many overall many things. Yeah, so obviously health tech, innovative models are relatively mainstream within the VC or, just broader health innovation space, right? We're trying to move people away from. Not always, but partly trying to move people away from hospitals and so on and go online and e pharmacies and so on.
So I guess the first version of the model was a very tech heavy model where we, instead of, like telehealth, you can use your phone to speak to a doctor. You could potentially order a medicine if you live in Singapore or a city, a major city. Our idea was that you'd have a kiosk, a shared telehealth model, if you will, where, health doesn't reach everywhere, but schools, shops.
Places of worship do, churches or temples or whatever. So the idea was we have a 10 inch tablet, you can speak to a doctor for free sponsored by companies, so companies and partners would pay for that infrastructure, and you could also order a discounted medicine that would be delivered back to that community facility.