Abiola Ayilara is a pioneering nurse and health informaticist and the founder and CEO of MyQura, a tech-enabled platform transforming care delivery in Nigeria. She is recognized for her healthcare innovation and her advocacy for digital health and the care economy. Her work bridges healthcare delivery, technology, caregiving, women’s leadership, and social impact.
Her career has progressed from frontline nursing and healthcare management to entrepreneurship, digital health, and systems-level advocacy. Through MyQura, she has delivered practical home-based care solutions, served over 250 clients, trained more than 1,000 caregivers, and launched the MyQura App to strengthen caregiver-client connections.
Her experiences have reinforced her belief that healthcare extends beyond hospital discharge and that home-based care should be more intentionally integrated into the healthcare system.
Abiola Ayilara holds multiple degrees, including a Master of Science in Healthcare Analytics & Artificial Intelligence from Sheffield Hallam University. She has previously served as a medical executive at Mediplan Healthcare Limited and worked as a registered general nurse at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust.
Can you share an early experience from your nursing career that made you realize care continues even after a patient leaves the hospital?
I began my nursing training in 2006 at the Lagos State College of Nursing, and in those days, what we knew about patient discharge was: The patient was stable, the paperwork was completed and signed, and the bed was cleaned for the next patient. The person was referred back to the outpatient department for post-admission appointments, which families rarely kept. Job done, or so we believed.
In the United Kingdom, working across the National Health Service (NHS) and homecare settings in elderly care, learning disability support, and mental health, I saw what happens on the other side of that door. When a patient went home, something was waiting for them: a care plan that traveled with them, carers who arrived when they said they would, and notes the next professional could read. The hospital did not let go of the patient. It handed them over.
I saw this most clearly when I worked in home care as a mental health support worker, learning disability advocate, and registered nurse on a respiratory and oncology ward. Each care plan sets out clear levels of responsibility, from the hospital discharge plan to care coordination at home to social care intervention. It was thorough, and everyone involved had a document to follow at every stage of the patient’s care journey.
When I came home to Nigeria, I began to see the opposite. Patients survived the hospital and then came home to a bed, a loving family, and no structure at all. No supervision, no documentation, no one to call when things began to slip. That contrast taught me that discharge is not the end of care. It is a handover, and in Nigeria, too often, there is nobody there to receive it.
Caregiving work often goes unnoticed and is usually unpaid. What has been the biggest challenge in getting people to see it as a profession that deserves training and fair pay?
The biggest challenge is that people mistake caregiving for love, and love isn’t supposed to come with a training manual or an invoice.
In many Nigerian homes, caring for a sick parent is understood as a duty that falls on a wife, a daughter, a niece, or a domestic worker. Because it happens inside the family, people treat it as something anyone can do. When I say a caregiver should be trained, vetted, supervised, and paid properly, some people hear that I am trying to put a price on affection. I am not. I am saying that turning a stroke patient safely, recognizing the early signs of a pressure sore, or knowing when a change in breathing needs escalation are skills. Good intentions do not replace them.
The second layer of the challenge is status. Caregiving is often grouped with domestic work, and domestic work in our society is undervalued. So the people doing this work, most of them women, are underpaid and rarely given a pathway to grow.
There is another side to this that rarely gets a spotlight: men. In my five years of running MyQura, I have seen that men also carry the emotional burden of caregiving. Many were conditioned not to show emotion or to see caregiving as their role, so their care looks different. Women carry the physical load more visibly, but men care too. Society simply gave their care a narrower title: provision.
Whether care comes from a daughter or a son, a wife or a husband, a relative, or a paid caregiver, it deserves recognition, and recognition begins with competence. That is why training sits at the centre of what we do. At the MyQura Healthcare Foundation School, caregivers complete a structured programme of learning, supervised practice, and mentorship before they qualify. When people see that structure, the conversation changes. They stop asking why care should cost money and start asking how to get a trained caregiver.
From your experience, what is the most obvious sign that caregiving is finally being recognized as a real profession?
The clearest sign for me is the questions families now ask. A few years ago, the first question was usually about price. Today, more families ask where the caregiver was trained, whether they have been vetted, who supervises them, and what happens if something goes wrong. When the questions move from cost to competence, recognition has begun.
The second sign is what happens to caregivers after training. Of the care professionals we have trained, at least 15 percent are now in active career progression, some of them in other countries. A role people can grow from is a profession. A role people simply survive in is not.
I also notice it in the rooms I find myself in. At a recent health summit I attended as a delegate, home healthcare services were named as part of the future of healthcare in Nigeria. That moment mattered to me. We are not where we need to be yet, but when home healthcare is named in those rooms, the conversation has started.
Was there a specific moment that turned that frustration into the decision to actually build MyQura?
Yes, and it was personal. I lost a loved one after a hospital discharge, not because the hospital failed, but because the care at home was informal and unsupported. There was love in that home. There was no structure.
As a nurse, I knew exactly what was missing: someone trained to watch, document, and know when to escalate. I had seen that system work in the United Kingdom. I could not accept that families here should be left to guess.
In 2021, I registered MyCare Assistant, which has since grown into MyQura. I did not set out to build a company. I set out to make sure fewer families would go through what mine did. The company was simply the most practical way to do it.
MyQura has helped over 250 clients and trained more than 1,000 caregivers. What did you learn in your first year that changed how you developed the business after that?
The first lesson was that placing a caregiver in a home is not the same as delivering care. Very quickly I saw that the quality of care depended less on the individual and more on what surrounded them. Who trains them? Who checks on them? Who do they call at two in the morning?
That shaped everything we built after. Families need more than a person at the door. They need confidence that the care is supported, supervised, and accountable.
The second lesson was about evidence. Families could feel the difference good care made, but home care in Nigeria has very little data to show it. Without evidence, it is hard to prove value, attract financing, or scale. For us, technology was never about being fashionable. It was about making good care visible and accountable.
Can you explain ‘The Homecare Framework’ and why you believe home-based care should be seen as part of our social infrastructure?
The Homecare Framework: Care as Infrastructure for Everyday Life brings together the elements that make care at home possible and dependable: caregiver training, patient safety, technology, family structures, culture, and policy. It treats homecare as a system rather than a one-off service, because each of these shapes what happens to a person once they leave the hospital.
I use the word infrastructure deliberately. Infrastructure is whatever everything else quietly depends on, and we tend to notice it only when it fails. Anyone who has run a delivery business knows that the hardest part of any journey is the last mile. A parcel can cross continents without trouble and still fail at the final doorstep. Healthcare works the same way. A hospital can deliver excellent treatment, and recovery can still fail in the last mile, which is the home.
Today, that last mile is largely left to chance. It is carried by whoever is available, a daughter, a son, a wife or a relative, often with no training, no standards, and no backup. Yet everyday life depends on it. Someone recovering from surgery needs support to regain independence. An older person may need help to remain safe and comfortable at home. A family member may need reliable care for a loved one so they can keep working. When that care fails, the cost shows up somewhere else: in readmissions, in lost income, and in the quiet loss of dignity for the person receiving care.
Nigeria must plan for care with the same seriousness it brings to the other foundations of national life. If care holds up everyday life, it should be planned, standardized, financed, and regulated like everything else. That is the book’s argument. Home-based care is not a private family matter sitting outside the health system. It is part of the foundation the health system stands on.
The framework covers caregiver training, patient safety, technology, family structures, culture, and policy. Which of these areas has been the hardest to get stakeholders to take seriously, and why? Policy, and with it the financing and clinical governance that policy should unlock.
Most people agree quickly that caregivers should be trained and that patient safety matters. The harder step is seeing that countless individual family needs add up to something larger: a workforce, a financing question and a public health issue. When the conversation turns to who pays, who sets the standards, and who is accountable, home care falls between the cracks. It is not quite a hospital service, not quite social welfare and not quite a family affair, so no one fully owns it.
Because care happens behind a front door, people sometimes assume standards can be relaxed. They cannot. A home should never be a place where safety, dignity or accountability become optional. The expectations we hold for any clinical setting, competence, supervision and a clear response when someone’s condition worsens, belong there too.
Evidence is what moves this forward, because decision makers fund what they can measure. Once we can show clearly what happens between discharge and home, policymakers and insurers can decide what to fund and what to regulate with confidence. Bringing those decision makers into the same room as the people who deliver care is exactly what the conference is designed to do.
What is The 2026 Care Conference Nigeria, and who are the people you most hope will attend?
The Care Conference is convened every two years by The Purple Global Mission, a non-profit I founded to advance professional development and advocacy in healthcare. This year it takes place in Lagos on 19 November 2026, as a single-day gathering.
The day is built around the whole system of care. Everyone comes together for the main plenaries, including a family panel and a session on clinical governance, because families and clinical standards are where every conversation about care has to begin. Delegates can then go deeper in focused rooms on the care workforce, care coordination, digital health and the financing of care.
The people I most hope to see are the ones who rarely sit together. I want policymakers and regulators in the same room as caregivers. I want insurers, health financiers and investors to hear directly from families who have carried the cost of care alone. I want hospital leaders, nurses, development partners and technology builders to leave with a shared picture of what care at home should look like. And I want families to come, because they are Nigeria’s largest care workforce.
Registration is open at purpleglobalmission.org/care-conference.
What important conversation about care is missing in Nigeria right now, and how do you hope this conference will bring it to the table?
The conversation I want us to have is about the journey home. After a patient is discharged, who takes responsibility for continuity of care? Is the family prepared? Is support available and affordable? If the person becomes unwell again, do we understand what happened between hospital and home?
For me, data is the anchor. In our own practice, we have seen how attentive care at home can help us identify problems and respond early. We need stronger evidence to understand those experiences nationwide. I hope the conference helps us agree on what to measure, how to collect information responsibly, and how that evidence can guide standards and investment.
If people in Nigeria start to value the care economy as much as tech or agriculture, what benefits do you hope they will see?
The first benefit would be dignity. Older people and people living with illness or disability could stay at home safely, supported by people who know what they are doing.
The second would be work. Care cannot be outsourced to another country or fully automated, and every community needs it. Treated as a real sector, it can create skilled, respectable jobs, particularly for women, with training and pathways for growth. More than 90 percent of the care professionals we have trained at MyQura are women, so I have seen what formal care work can do for a household’s income and a woman’s confidence.
The third would be a stronger health system. When care at home is organized, hospitals are not forced to hold patients who could recover at home, and fewer people come back sicker than they left.
The fourth is often overlooked: family members, especially daughters and wives, but sons and husbands too, would be free to keep their jobs and careers instead of leaving them to become full-time carers. That is productivity the economy currently loses without ever counting it.
Investors and governments back sectors they can see clearly, with standards, data and credible returns. Care deserves the same seriousness, and the returns will be felt in almost every Nigerian home.
What is something about the care economy that you wish more people understood?
That the care economy in home healthcare already exists, and it is already enormous. We are simply not counting it.
Care makes other kinds of work possible. A person can run a business, go to work, or continue their education because someone is supporting a child, an older relative, or a loved one who is unwell. Every day, across Nigeria, someone is bathing a parent, managing medication or sitting up through the night with a relative after surgery. Because most of this happens unpaid and behind closed doors, we treat it as though it costs nothing. It costs a great deal. We pay for it in lost income, exhausted families, and avoidable trips back to hospital.
I also wish we understood dignity more practically. It is present in how someone is helped to bathe, whether their choices are respected, and whether they feel safe with the person supporting them. Dignity means a person can receive support without being reduced to a burden, a family can ask for help without shame, and a caregiver can be respected as a professional.
So the care economy is not a new industry we need to invent. It is an existing one we need to recognize, organize, and support. When we do, care stops being a private burden and becomes what it truly is: part of the infrastructure of everyday life.
Looking back at everything you’ve built, including MyQura, the framework, and the conference, what has surprised you most about yourself?
How far a concern rooted in nursing has taken me, and how much patience I have found for slow work.
I began with simple questions about the person needing care and the family trying to support them. Those questions have led me into entrepreneurship, technology, writing, and policy advocacy. I didn’t plan that journey, but each step followed the last.
Nursing teaches you to respond quickly. A patient deteriorates, and you act. Building a system is the opposite. Training a caregiver properly takes months. Changing how families think about care takes years. Moving policy can take longer still. I have learned that meaningful systems are built gradually: one family served well, one caregiver trained, one partnership formed, one conversation changed.
I have also learned that I do not need to be the loudest person in the room, or to have every answer before I begin. I need to keep learning, listen carefully, and build with others. Steady work, done well, eventually speaks for itself, and what matters most to me is that it improves someone’s life. That keeps me connected to the reason I started.
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