DermAfricans

Working as an MO in Ogbomoso, rural Southwestern Nigeria, I kept seeing the same pattern: a patient shows up with a skin condition, and care just stalls while everyone waits for the dermatologist. I started looking into what resources existed to bridge that gap, and the honest answer was — not much. Almost no dermatology reference images for dark skin, which meant conditions that would be caught quickly elsewhere were routinely missed or misread. Certainly nothing that showed how these conditions actually look on Black skin, which is a completely different clinical picture from what most textbooks teach.

So I decided to build the resource that would have changed those consultations. DermAfricans.com started as a structured compendium of dermatological conditions as they present on Black skin, with management guidance for clinicians who are not specialists. V2 now covers over 60 conditions, and we have started rolling out local language support for the three main Nigerian languages — because the clinicians who need this most are not always working in English. Alongside the platform, I built DermAI, a diagnostic tool now running at about 85% accuracy in beta, trained specifically to close that accuracy gap. We are also evaluating general-purpose multimodal LLMs and how efficiently they perform in low-resource settings like ours.

The outcome so far: 2,500+ registered healthcare-professional users and over 4,600 visits since inception. I built it because I kept watching care get delayed waiting for a specialist who was not always coming. That problem has not gone away. But now there is something for the patient and the clinician that was not there before. Next priority is an institutional paid tier, which a GEO audit identified as the highest-leverage next step.