Founderland Awards Q2 2026 Forward Grant to Manje Health
#ForwardGrants
We’re proud to announce Prudence Mafuta Persson, founder and CEO of Manje Health, as the Q2 2026 recipient of the Founderland Forward Grant.
Manje Health is building cross-border healthcare payment infrastructure that enables people in the diaspora to pay hospitals, pharmacies, diagnostic labs and insurers directly for the care of loved ones back home. For Prudence, the problem is deeply personal.
When sending money isn't enough
In 2010, Prudence’s mother was diagnosed with a tumour in Zambia. Her family had no health insurance.
Living in Sweden, Prudence began sending money home to help cover her mother’s medical bills. But every payment came with uncertainty. Would the money arrive in time? Would it reach the clinic? Would her mother receive care before the funds cleared?
Her mother survived.
But over the next fifteen years, Prudence watched versions of the same experience play out across diaspora families: people willing and able to pay for a loved one’s healthcare, but forced to rely on financial infrastructure that was never designed for healthcare.
The scale of those financial flows is enormous. In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, formally recorded remittances reached $54 billion in 2023. Sending $200 to the region cost an average of 7.9%, according to the World Bank.
And when the money is intended for urgent medical care, the problem goes beyond fees. Traditional remittance services move money to people. They do not necessarily give a hospital or pharmacy the certainty it needs to begin treatment.
Prudence saw an infrastructure problem hiding inside a remittance problem
Building the payment infrastructure healthcare needs
Manje Health is designed to close that gap.
From Europe or North America, diaspora families can use Manje to pay verified healthcare providers directly for services such as consultations, diagnostics, medicines and insurance.
Instead of sending money to a relative and hoping it reaches the right place at the right time, the payment is connected directly to care.
As Prudence puts it: “Manje means now. Because healthcare cannot wait.”
The company is already moving well beyond an idea.
Manje has built a network of more than 700 healthcare providers through partnerships including SIC Life Insurance in Ghana and the Healthcare Federation of Zambia. The company has also secured diaspora distribution partnerships, including an agreement with the Ghanaian-Diaspora Nursing Alliance, representing more than 4,000 members.
Its early Sweden-Ghana pilot has already processed insurance payments and brought close to 50 lives under management.
And earlier this year, Manje received another major validation: it was selected for the Mastercard Lighthouse MASSIV Spring 2026 cohort and went on to win the program, which supports Nordic and Baltic companies building scalable solutions in sustainability and social impact.
Why the jury selected Manje Health
The Forward Grant exists to back women of colour founders building ambitious companies while navigating structural barriers to accessing the capital, networks and opportunities needed to grow them. Prudence's application stood out not simply because of the scale of the problem she is addressing, but because of how much she has already de-risked.
She has built the product. She has established healthcare provider partnerships. She has secured access to diaspora communities. She has processed real transactions. And she is building on existing global payment infrastructure rather than attempting to recreate it.
At the same time, she has been building across two ecosystems that are too often treated as disconnected: European fintech and African healthcare.
“As a Black woman from Zambia building in Sweden, my primary obstacle has been the ‘double glass ceiling’ of intersectional bias in venture capital,” Prudence shared in her application.
She describes having to overcome a persistent “trust tax”: working harder to prove both her own expertise and the commercial viability of markets that remain a blind spot for many European investors.
This is exactly the kind of gap the Forward Grant is intended to help close.
What comes next
Prudence plans to use the Forward Grant to turn Manje’s existing partnerships and infrastructure into significantly more transaction volume.
That means activating diaspora communities across Europe, bringing more users onto the platform, reducing friction around first transactions and demonstrating that cross-border healthcare payments can become a scalable category of financial infrastructure.
Over the next 18 months, Manje is targeting three major milestones: reaching €150,000 in annual recurring revenue, processing 2,500 transactions through its cross-border payment infrastructure, and using that traction to position the company for its next institutional funding round.
The ambition is much bigger than making remittances slightly faster.
It is to ensure that when someone receives a call saying a parent, sibling or loved one needs medical care back home, distance does not prevent them from acting.
Looking ahead
We encourage the community to follow Prudence and Manje Health as the company continues its journey.
Learn more at https://manjehealth.com/.
About the Founderland Forward Grant
The Founderland Forward Grant provides equity-free funding to founders building ambitious, high-impact companies. Grants are designed to support critical inflection points, enabling founders to move faster and build with greater focus.