Brown Button Foundation: Mother’s Delivery Kit (MDK)

Recently updated on July 7th, 2018 at 08:59 pm

Adepeju Jaiyeoba is the founder and CEO of Mother’s Delivery Kit (MDK), a Lagos-based social enterprise established to promote and enhance safe births, instigate behavioural change and economically empower women in Nigeria.

In 2011, Adepeju Jaiyeoba lost her friend due to pregnancy/childbirth-related complications. This, and the fact that she saw women giving birth on bare floors, birth attendants severing umbilical cord with rusty blades or broken glass, jolted her into action.

The same year, she founded the Brown Button Foundation, a nonprofit organization that trains birth attendants in rural villages in Nigeria. The company has trained more than 8,000 birth attendants across the country who have also gone on to train others.

In 2013, she launched Mother’s Delivery Kit (MDK), a social enterprise that provides affordable sterile supplies for childbirth. So far, over 50,000 kits have been delivered.

Adepeju holds a degree in Law from the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife and a certificate in Global Change Leadership from the Coady International Institute in Canada. She also participated in the 2013 Global Change Leaders programme.

In 2014 she was selected to take part in the prestigious 2014 Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders. In 2015, she was recognised as a “young innovator” at the World Innovation Summit for Health and in the same year, she was was one of five emerging entrepreneurs invited to pitch her idea at a White House event showcasing the impact of U.S. government initiatives and was honoured at the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Washington DC.