This month, I watched another piece of good news about a Cameroonian startup travel across social media.

Waspito had just won the $250,000 grand prize at the Rocket Fuel competition during LEAP 2026 in Riyadh, becoming the first African company to win the competition's top prize. The congratulations came quickly, but somewhere beneath one of the posts, the conversation took an interesting turn. Someone asked a simple question: with all the funding and awards Waspito receives it; who actually uses it?

People were invited to comment if they had the application or had ever used its services. I returned to the conversation hours later and struggled to find anyone saying yes.

That stayed with me.

Not because it proves nobody uses Waspito; it doesn't. Google Play alone shows more than 500,000 downloads, while Waspito says it now connects 1.1 million patients with 2,100 doctors and more than 500 healthcare providers across Cameroon and Côte d'Ivoire. But the conversation exposed something else: we may celebrate African startups without always understanding what they actually do for ordinary Africans.

So, forget the funding for a moment. What can Waspito actually do for you?

Imagine waking up in a ghost town in Bamenda with a health concern that does not necessarily require an emergency room but is serious enough that Google probably shouldn't be your doctor. Instead of travelling across town, waiting at a hospital, and hoping the right specialist is available, Waspito allows you to select a verified doctor and have a video consultation from your phone.

If tests are required, its model goes further. Waspito works with laboratories so samples can be collected from patients, with results delivered digitally. It has also partnered with hospitals so patients requiring physical treatment after an online consultation can continue their care offline.

That is where the company becomes more interesting than another startup funding headline.

Waspito was founded in 2020 by Cameroonian entrepreneur Jean Lobe Lobe after losing his father while he was being transported to see a cardiologist. The problem he decided to attack was therefore painfully familiar: in many African communities, accessing healthcare is not simply about whether a doctor exists. It is also about distance, waiting time, information, and whether the patient reaches that doctor early enough.

By 2023, Waspito reported 650,000 users and 60,000 consultations across Cameroon and Côte d'Ivoire. It had also raised $2.7 million in 2022 and another $2.5 million in 2023 to expand its model across Francophone Africa.

None of this means Waspito has solved healthcare. Downloads are not the same as active patients, company-reported users are not necessarily paying users, and even its Google Play reviews include people complaining about response times and the availability of professionals. Those questions matter, particularly for a healthcare platform where reliability can be more important than beautiful technology.

But perhaps there is another question worth asking.

How many useful African products are we discussing mainly when they raise money?

We celebrate the founder when TechCrunch writes about them, celebrate again when investors arrive, and congratulate them when they win something in Riyadh. Then everybody goes home without explaining to the woman running a shop in Bafoussam, the student in Buea, or the family in Yaoundé why any of this technology might matter to them.

That is partly a startup problem, but it is also a media problem.

African technology needs more than founders building useful products. It needs ordinary people understanding them, questioning them, trying them, and deciding whether they deserve a permanent place in their lives.

Perhaps that should be the more interesting measure of Waspito's next chapter.

Not another million dollars raised or another photograph from an international stage, valuable as those achievements are, but whether the next time someone asks online, “Who here actually uses Waspito?”, the question no longer sits unanswered for hours.

Sometimes the distance African startups still need to travel is not from Cameroon to Riyadh. It is from the headline to the person the product was built for.