Women and healthcare can be a taboo topic due to certain engrained social stigma; how can the gap be closed – specifically in the GCC region?
You know what’s wild? We’re living in 2025, sending people into space for fun, and yet half the population still whispers about periods like they’re some kind of state secret.
In the GCC, this issue is exacerbated by social stigma attached to many aspects of women’s health, from periods to perimenopause. These stigmas prevent women from seeing doctors for potentially serious health issues, right up until the point where symptoms become impossible to ignore.
The result? Pretty terrible health outcomes. For example, 80% of breast cancers in MENA are diagnosed at Stage 4 (27% five-year survival rate) versus in the UK, where 80% are diagnosed at Stages 1 and 2 (99% five-year survival rate).
Trying to change culture doesn’t work, and even if it did, we wouldn’t want to do it. The cultural richness of the GCC is arguably one of its greatest assets. Instead, at NABTA, we try to address taboos by creating safe spaces where conversations can happen naturally, and by meeting women where they are, both literally and figuratively.
Hybrid platforms like NABTA’s allow for privacy that traditional healthcare settings can’t always provide. When a woman can access information about PCOS or menopause from her own home and consult a doctor, without explaining to anyone why she needs the appointment, you make it possible for her to be seen without judgement. Add cultural intelligence to the mix, et voila! You’re away.
A mission-led startup in the Middle East can be a hit or a miss, can you tell us more how you braved this specific topic and how you went about doing it on the ground?
I’m not sure I really had a choice in the matter. If you’re mission-led as an individual, wired for or against a particular thing (in my case, injustice), you’re going to naturally be drawn to building companies that are also mission-led. And there’s going to be one mission that drives you more than others.
I founded four companies in three years before NABTA, all of them mission-led – a doctor-finding, appointment-booking platform in Pakistan; a plastic recycling company in Sierra Leone. But although the impact of these companies was a key driver for me, they weren’t “the” company I wanted to build, “the” problem I wanted to solve.
I remember in 2014, shortly after I started my first company, I pitched it to an investor back in the UK. He stopped me halfway through the pitch and said, “Sophie, don’t take this the wrong way… I’m sure you’re going to be very successful at whatever you do in life, but this is not it.”
I was taken aback. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“You don’t want it enough,” he said.
“What do you mean I don’t want it enough?” I asked, confused.
He looked at me gently, kindly, and said, “When you find what you’re meant to be doing – when you want “it” enough – you’ll know.”
For years, this niggled at me. What did “want it enough” mean? I knew I wanted a family, and to spend time with my kids. Did that mean I would never want any company “enough”? Was I never going to be dedicated enough, focused enough, “enough” as Sophie, to make it a success?
And then, about six months into founding NABTA, the investor’s words came back to me, one day as I was driving home from the mall in the middle of the night.
Wanting to solve a problem “enough” isn’t about excluding all other sources of joy from your life. It isn’t about choosing not to start a family or choosing to spend time away from your kids. You can build a family and a business in parallel, and you can do it your way, and lots of people do.
Wanting it “enough” means, in those quiet moments where you could be doing anything or thinking about anything, it’s the problem you’re trying to solve that comes to mind. In the shower, in the car, when you’re doing the grocery run – your company and your customers, and the impact you’re chasing, are the things you think about.
That’s how I knew NABTA was the company for me. That’s how I knew I wanted it “enough”. And the fact that we’re building it here in the Middle East, where women have historically been among the most underserved in terms of their healthcare – that’s always been fuel, not a deterrent.
Why does investing in women’s health make business and financial sense, specifically in the case of Nabta Health?
For us, the business case for investing in women’s health has always been obvious – women’s health is a US$1.3 trillion market globally, largely untapped, with fewer than 1% of companies looking at the 645 million underserved women in the Middle East and Africa.
But here’s where it gets really interesting from a business perspective. Despite most companies providing access to healthcare in some form to their female employees, women are not getting the care they need. It takes four times longer on average to diagnose women with the same chronic conditions as men, even though they’re twice as likely to claim on insurance.
Companies are paying 90-200% of an employee’s annual salary when they lose senior female talent. For executives, that can exceed 213% when you factor in recruitment, training, and lost productivity. Meanwhile, our hybrid healthcare model delivers a 30.1% reduction in hospital admissions and 23% cost savings on medical expenses.
So, imagine you’re a CEO looking at your bottom line. You can either keep paying hundreds of thousands in replacement costs every time a talented woman leaves due to health disruptions, OR you can invest in preventive, comprehensive women’s healthcare that keeps your talent pipeline intact while actually reducing your overall healthcare spend.
From NABTA’s perspective, proper, woman-centric care creates incredible customer lifetime value. When companies see measurable ROI, reduced attrition, increased productivity, better ESG metrics, they don’t just renew their contracts, they expand them.
For companies like NABTA, who work with payors directly to reduce the cost of healthcare and improve its effectiveness, the business case is not just “better healthcare”, it’s “better business”.
Decentralized diagnosis is a way to liberate women from the social problems arising from taboo to social no-no; how is it that the democratization of care can benefit everyone?
Our ultimate objective at NABTA is health sovereignty for women. What does that mean? It means empowering women to become the primary architects of their own care, and the ultimate sources of knowledge about their own bodies. It means giving every woman – regardless of where she’s from, or what she looks like, or how much money she earns – the knowledge, tools and access to get the care she needs, when she needs it.
This is where technology becomes genuinely revolutionary. When you have the ability to shift knowledge and tools away from healthcare providers and put them in the hands of women – when you decentralise and democratise access to care – you enable women and remove gatekeepers.
Think about it: a 22-year-old dealing with irregular periods doesn’t have to explain to her family why she needs a gynecologist appointment. A 35-year-old exploring fertility options can access information and initial consultations without office gossip. A 48-year-old experiencing perimenopause symptoms can get proper diagnosis without being dismissed as “just stressed.”
NABTA’s 24/7 digital platform means a woman in Abu Dhabi or Jeddah or Cairo has the ability to access the same quality of care as someone in Dubai. Evening clinic hours accommodate everyone’s schedule, not just the traditional 9-to-5. Multilingual support (we offer 5 languages) means language isn’t a barrier to healthcare.
And then there’s the beautiful ripple effect: when women have better health outcomes, entire families benefit. Women are key household decision-makers, responsible for 80% of caregiving and 80% of consumption decision-making globally. When you empower women, you uplift society. Children have healthier mothers. Partners have fewer caregiving obligations. Companies have more productive employees. Healthcare systems have better preventive care ratios.
A rising tide lifts all boats. When you democratise care for the historically underserved 50% of the population, you improve health outcomes for everyone.
Nabta Health sits on the intersection of AI, ethics and equity, how can this triangle be balanced and these supposedly disparate sectors aligned?
Our approach to women’s health puts equity at the center of care. The very nature of decentralised, personalised healthcare means building care to cater for the health and wellbeing of each individual, regardless of their age, stage, income status or country of origin.
When we develop our AI tools, our training data deliberately includes diverse populations: different ages, ethnicities, and health profiles. Because if our AI learns that “normal” looks like a 25-year-old white woman, we’re reinforcing systemic biases not eliminating them.
In terms of the balance between artificial and human inputs, we’ve designed our platform to exist around an “augmented intelligence” – combining patient, clinician and artificial intelligence to deliver the best health outcomes for women. In our world, AI augments human care, it doesn’t replace it. Our care teams use AI-powered insights to provide better recommendations, but the relationship between patient and provider remains fundamentally human. Women aren’t interacting with chatbots about their reproductive health, they’re getting AI-enhanced care from real healthcare professionals who live in the same places and understand the same cultural nuances as they do.
In terms of access, this is where the equity piece gets really exciting. AI allows us to scale personalised care in ways that were impossible before. Instead of one-size-fits-all treatment protocols provided in a one-to-one relationship by a specialist, our augmented intelligence means we can provide individualised care plans that take inputs from multiple specialties and account for each individual’s reality, including genetic factors, lifestyle realities, cultural considerations, and personal preferences.
And then we ask questions, and we validate continuously. We know we’re succeeding if we can demonstrate that we’re eliminating health inequities and improving the health sovereignty of women in quantifiable ways. Are women from different socioeconomic backgrounds getting equal access to preventive care options such as annual health checks? Do they do them? When they do them, do they understand and act on the results?
At NABTA, the AI-ethics-equity triangle stays balanced because each point reinforces the others. Ethical AI builds trust, which improves equity. Equitable access provides diverse data, which improves AI. And better AI enables more ethical, equitable care delivery. For us, achieving an equilibrium is not about balancing competing priorities, it’s about creating synergy between them.
