Dr. Gbemisola Boyede of Ask The Paediatricians 🏥Connecting Nigerian parents to doctors so they can keep kids healthy

Today we're interviewing Dr. Gbemisola Boyede, the founder of Ask The Paediatricians, an online medical education community that can offer all of us some much-needed inspiration in the time of COVID-19.

In Nigeria, child mortality rates are high because of a common challenge: a geographic and information gap between parents and practitioners that leaves many parents uninformed. To solve this problem, Dr. Gbemi opened an "Ask The Paediatricians" Facebook group five years ago. Today, that group connects 580,000 parents with medical questions to more than 2,000 doctors, nurses and experts.

What stuck out from our conversation with Dr. Gbemi was how natural her community-building instincts were. No matter if your community gathers online or off, the secret to community building isn't about management, it's about creating leaders. Dr. Gbemi has done that at every stage of her journey, giving volunteer moderators tools, bringing other doctors in to do webinars instead of just leading them herself, and giving people all sorts of roles and ways to plug into the mission in their local areas.