How Neo Hutiri built a medication-collection system now serving over 1.7 million patients
Katlego Sekhu
Neo Hutiri recently joined Fresh and Thato on Kaya Breakfast‘s Big Moves segment, not to talk about his awards, the funding rounds, or the international recognition. He was there to talk about a queue.
Not just any queue. The one he sat in for three hours at a Tshwane clinic in 2014, waiting for tuberculosis treatment that took the nurse minutes to actually hand over. That frustration became Pelebox: a network of smart lockers that now let patients across South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana collect chronic medication with a one-time PIN in under 30 seconds.
“Simply put, we focus on getting patients to collect medication quickly,” Hutiri told Fresh and Thato. “Think of it as an ATM for medicine. Instead of having to spend time in the queue, you go to the self-service kiosk, you enter your cell phone number and your one-time pin that would have been sent to you. One of the doors pops open, you collect your treatment and you’re on your way.”
An unlikely origin story
Before Pelebox, Hutiri had no background in healthcare at all. He trained as an electrical engineer at the University of Cape Town, then spent years in manufacturing, automating conveyor belts in the Vaal and working as a technical assistant to the COO at ArcelorMittal.
“I did not have any relationship with the healthcare space,” he said. His pivot started elsewhere entirely, with a logistics business he’d sunk his savings into, cancelling his medical aid in the process. Then, almost immediately, came the TB diagnosis.
“I think God has a wicked sense of humour,” he joked. “You cancel the medical aid, TB comes knocking very, very fast.”
The diagnosis carried extra weight given his family’s history with the disease. “TB had been something that, you attend a couple of funerals and people pass on,” he said. “I was very much determined to say, look, you don’t want to be a stat, you want to make sure that you manage your treatment.”
It was in the clinic queue, watching how little time he actually spent with a nurse compared to how long he waited to get there, that the idea took shape. His background helped him see the problem in industrial terms. “In my previous career, I had done a master’s in industrial engineering, predominantly just focused on de-bottlenecking manufacturing pipelines,” he explained. “Sort of bringing that into the public space and then realising that you are a patient, you are within a queue, and there is a bottleneck here.”
From idea to first locker
Getting from concept to a working locker wasn’t quick or easy. Hutiri pitched the City of Johannesburg, was met with scepticism, and eventually found his way into an Innovation Hub incubation programme that came with early funding. A win at the City of Johannesburg’s HackJozi competition, worth R1 million, helped fund the first product build.
The real breakthrough came from the City of Tshwane, which agreed to test the solution in one clinic in Mamelodi. What followed was an 18-month pilot proving the system could match the right medicine to the right patient every time, avoid mix-ups, and win patients over.
Privacy was, and remains, central to how the system works. “We will never put information about what type of treatment somebody’s on in the locker,” Hutiri said. “There isn’t any identifying medical condition that is there… You sit with transactional data, but you don’t sit with any personal data.” The lockers integrate with existing Department of Health systems rather than duplicating patient records.
Recognition on a global stage
In 2019, Hutiri became the first South African to win the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Africa Prize. Five years later, he returned to London to receive the Academy’s 10th anniversary medal and £50,000 from Princess Anne, selected from a decade of winners across the continent.
“Sometimes you’re an entrepreneur on the ground and you’re fighting hard, you’re building an innovation,” he said. “I wanted to represent my country. We were selected as the overall winner for an organisation that has created impact… leveraged engineering principles to create value in community for society.”
This year marks the first time the Africa Prize ceremony will be hosted in South Africa, on 28 October in Johannesburg.
Scale across the region
Pelebox now operates in more than 100 healthcare facilities across South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana, powering over 1.7 million medication collections. For Hutiri, the comparison that sticks is Coca-Cola’s distribution reach.
“I’ve really loved the idea of what Coca-Cola has been able to do, being able to deliver a Coke to every part of the continent,” he said. “I do feel like if that exists, why shouldn’t it exist for health? Whether you’re sitting in Eswatini, spending four hours in a queue, or in Lesotho, that problem is identical. People are paying this time tax of needing to manage their chronic condition.”
Asked what’s next, Hutiri pointed to local manufacturing. “I’m loving the idea of building a manufacturing company that can employ people in South Africa,” he said. “As an entrepreneur, you are one person, but you become so much more when you can effectively build with others.”
To hear the conversation, listen to the Kaya Breakfast podcast.
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