Hey 👋

Sheriff here

For a few weeks now, I’ve been writing about originality in African tech and how we can get closer to building tech that’s truly African.

This week, I’ll be telling you about a startup that I think truly fits the bill.

Read till the end and let me know what you think.

Let’s get into it.

And it exclusively targets women.

The wildest part? Its design is based on an accessory that African women have worn for 2,500 years.

The startup is called Bèbèdí, a Yoruba word that means "waist”. 

It tracks health data, just like every other fitness wearable does.

But it does it in a way that’s more useful to women.

I think it’s one of the clearest cases of originality in African tech. 

But if this is the first time you’re hearing about it, you're probably wondering...

Every piece of technology we use borrows from an existing form factor. 

A form factor is simply the shape, size, and physical design of a product. 

And the best ones often feel immediately familiar.

The keyboard is just a better typewriter. The TV is a better stage screen. And the smartphone is a better telephone. 

Great design doesn't ask people to learn something new. It gives them something they already understand, but in an upgraded format.

The same is true for wearable technology.

Every major wearable company, Apple, Whoop, Oura, and Fitbit, competes on two form factors: the watch and the ring. 

Bèbèdí is taking a form factor that women are already familiar with, waist beads, and adding technology to it. 

But the choice isn't random or merely aesthetic. 

It's deeply cultural and has practical use for everyday women.

Waist beads are one of the oldest forms of body adornment in Africa.

In Southwest Nigeria, they’re known as ileke.

To the Hausa, it’s jigida.

To the Igbo, it’s mgbájí. 

And in Swahili, it’s kago.

Their use in Igbo culture dates back to 500 BC, and historians trace versions of them to ancient Egypt, where they were called girdles. 

Across Africa, waist beads have carried layered meaning.

They’re used as symbols of fertility and femininity,

They’re used for spiritual rites and protection.

And they’re strong signals of status and female sensuality.

But here's the part most people miss. Historically, women have used waist beads as an unofficial tracking device for their bodies. 

When beads sit tight, it could signify bloating or a change in body weight that aligns with their hormonal cycle. 

When they roll freely, it could mean the opposite. 

Mothers have given daughters waist beads partly as a body-awareness tool for generations. 

So when Bèbèdí puts sensors into this form factor, it's not unfamiliar. 

It's completing a loop that women in these cultures started centuries ago, using the waist as a site of body intelligence.

And the timing matters, because...

In 1977, the FDA (the USA’s drug regulator) created a policy that excluded all premenopausal women from clinical trials.

Like all things that go bad, it started with good intentions.

In 1961, a drug named Thalidomide caused a global health scare.

It had been marketed in Europe and Australia as a cure for morning sickness, but it caused pregnant women to give birth to children with deformed limbs.

This scandal drew public attention towards drug safety.

The response of governments (especially in the US) was logical. Drug safety requires a long period of observation.

And if an approved and effective drug can turn out to be bad for women, then experimental ones should definitely be kept away from them.

The FDA policy of 1977 was the natural conclusion of that logic.

But here’s the thing: that policy was interpreted so broadly that it kept nearly all women out of drug research for 15 years.

It wasn't until 1993 that it was repealed, and female inclusion in clinical trials became a legal requirement.

So for 15 years, drugs, dosages, and treatments were developed and tested almost entirely on men, then applied to women as if biology were one-size-fits-all.

The effects of that gap persist today. 

An analysis of 1,400 clinical trials showed interesting patterns.

On average, only 41% of participants in these trials were female. 

This was true even for trials focused on conditions like cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in women.

The funding picture is equally skewed. 

A report found that between 2013 and 2023, only 9% of the US’s National Institute of Health research spending went towards women’s health research.

And in 75% of cases where a disease mainly affects one gender, the NIH’s funding behavior favored men.

Conditions that disproportionately affect women, like endometriosis, PCOS, migraines, and autoimmune disorders, remain chronically underfunded relative to their burden. 

And this neglect comes at a huge economic cost.

Women spend 25% more of their lives in poor health compared to men.

Closing this gap alone could add $1 trillion a year to global GDP by 2040.

Somewhere in that daily struggle women face with their health is where Bèbèdí enters. 

The company is trying to build what could become the largest longitudinal dataset on women's health, collected passively, through a device women actually want to wear. 

It tracks steps, basal body temperature, and hormonal cycle patterns. 

But its most distinctive signal is waist circumference.

Research has shown that abdominal fat distribution is a stronger predictor of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease than overall body weight. 

A consensus statement in Nature Reviews Endocrinology recommended that waist circumference be treated as a "vital sign" in clinical practice. 

Yet no consumer wearable currently tracks it continuously, especially in women.

Bèbèdí tracks this daily and uses AI to interpret the numbers for women.

It devised its own proprietary methods for taking these readings and has scored two provisional patents.

While it’s only just launched, it’s gained a lot of interest. Over 1,000 people have signed up for a growing waitlist ahead of a Q2 2026 preorder launch.

But this Rome wasn’t built in a day.

The founder, Tosin Oyegoke, spent seven years building and designing fashion waist beads for women globally.

She’s shipped to 50+ countries and built a community of 200,000 health-conscious women in the process.

She also struggled with some of the health issues women typically face, and needed a way to keep track of her health without intrusion.

Bèbèdí is the perfect marriage of form-factor innovation and deep familiarity with a problem.

But there’s a bigger picture here.

We've written about originality in African tech before. 

Bèbèdí is really what it looks like when it shows up.

Tosin Oyegoke didn't arrive at this idea by sitting in a lab trying to build a wearable product. 

If she were, she’d have probably built another Fitbit.

She started it by doing something way outside of tech, selling waist beads.

And she built a global community around it.

Inside that community, she discovered just how many women lived with health conditions they couldn’t quite understand. 

And she was able to make the connection that led to the creation of Bebedi. 

The most original ideas aren’t engineered, they’re discovered. And sometimes, it spurs great success.

Moniepoint, one of Africa’s unicorns, used to be a small software consulting outfit for banks.

It was building many different products when it discovered just how much people were adopting offline payments. 

Then it built the Moniepoint POS terminal and launched it to market. The rest, they say, is history.

And when you think about it, the POS terminal is really just a small ATM.

When you think of truly successful innovations, there’s one truth that holds in nearly every case: it’s form factors all the way down.

What’s an example of an African product that seemed so different yet so familiar to you?

Tell me here.

That’s it for this week. See you on Sunday for a breakdown on This Week in African Tech.

Cheers,

The Tech Safari Team

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