Case Studies
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4 min
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Mubarak Odeyemi
In Nigeria, roughly 60% of community pharmacies frequently run out of essential medicines, and more than half operate without steady access to supply or finance. These are pharmacies caught in a hard equation where you can only stock what you can afford to buy, and you can only serve the customers your stock can satisfy.
Divine Peace Pharmacy has lived inside that equation for five years.
"For you to really succeed as a retail pharmacy, you need capital. With that, you will be able to meet up with the demands of your customers' needs."
That is Udokanma, who runs Divine Peace. She is honest that the 5-year journey has not been easy, and the reason is the one at the centre of that national statistic: financing.
Financing shapes how often she can restock, how full her shelves are, and whether she can say yes when a customer asks for a med.
To manage it, she has built a careful system where she procures once or twice a month rather than continuously. She partners with HMOs to keep a steady base of orders coming in. She keeps a nearby wholesaler, NHC, close at hand for the urgent demands, calling ahead to check what they have and going to collect it herself when a customer needs something she doesn't have on the shelf.
It is a system built around what is available, and for 5 years, it has worked.
The part nobody likes to talk about
There is a particular moment that every community pharmacist recognises. A customer walks in, asks for a product, but the pharmacy doesn't have it.
"It's kind of embarrassing. That's like sales getting lost."
What Udokanma does in this situation is to ask the customer to come back in about two hours, calls NHC, and moves fast to get the product in. Sometimes the customer comes back. Sometimes they don't.
"Some people just want to get their product instantly as they are asking."
For a pharmacy already working within tight stock limits, each of those moments is a small double loss, the sale, and a little of the trust that brought the customer in.
Udokanma wanted to grow. The difficulty was how to grow without waiting for conditions to become perfect.
Why she almost said no
When Udokanma first came across Famasi, she was already wary, because she had been let down before.
Two earlier partnerships in the pharmacy space had offered growth and delivered something else. Underneath the arrangements were charges and pricing structures that pushed her products beyond what her own customers were willing to pay. People complained about the prices. Hence, it stopped feeling like support, and she had made up her mind not to repeat the experience.
"I had already made up my mind I wasn't going to do anything like that."
So when Famasi appeared, through a post she saw online and a referral from someone who knew she was looking for ways to grow, she did not take it at face value.
She researched the company. She read what she could find. Only after deciding the model was genuinely different, a platform that could send her real orders rather than an arrangement working against her margins, did she sign up.
How Dispensary opened a new channel
Famasi listed Divine Peace on Chowdeck, one of the most active ordering platforms in Nigerian cities.
Getting listed on your own can be time-consuming as there are requirements and procedures that most independent pharmacies do not have the time to navigate while also running a pharmacy. Udokanma knew this.
"If I had to do it on my own, I don't think it would have been easy. I know it takes a lot of procedures."
Alongside the listing, her pharmacy began using Dispensary, Famasi's pharmacy management software, to handle walk-in sales.
Through the CareCapital programme, Udokanma had been hearing other pharmacy owners talk about orders arriving through Dispensary, from customers they had never met. She was watching people like her succeed.
Then it was her turn. The first Chowdeck order came from a complete stranger, someone who found Divine Peace through the platform, with no referral, no HMO or prior visit.
"I was happy. I was so happy. When my order came, I was like, wow, this is true."
This was proof that customers who did not know Divine Peace existed could now find the pharmacy and buy from it.
The result so far
When asked what the Famasi partnership had delivered for her business, she did not hesitate to say:
"I have more confidence."
Sales have improved. Orders are now coming from HMOs and from Chowdeck, two channels where there used to be one. She knows more products need to be added, so her stock depth is a work in progress. But the direction is set, and she can now see what building toward it looks like.
"By the time my inventory is up and I have enough stock in place, I can boast of making so much revenue from Chowdeck. There's huge traffic there. I can get up to 50 orders in a day."
That is the plan of a pharmacy owner who has already seen the evidence and now has a reason to build toward something bigger.
What other pharmacies can take from Divine Peace
Two things stand out from Udokanma's experience.
First, scepticism is reasonable, and research is how you act on it. She had been burned before, so she checked Famasi out properly before committing. Trust in any healthcare partnership should be earned that way.
Second, reach can grow before capital does. Divine Peace hasn't solved its financing constraint, and doesn't claim to. What changed is that a new channel now brings customers to the pharmacy she already runs, without waiting for the shelves to be perfect first.
"Of course, I would recommend Famasi. The sales have improved because I'm getting orders not only from HMOs but from Chowdeck. I've seen a huge difference," she said.
For pharmacy owners looking for more visibility, more orders, and a better way to grow, Divine Peace Pharmacy’s story shows what can happen when your pharmacy gets connected to the right sales channel.
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