We began our final day in Mombasa by spending more time sightseeing downtown. We saw the Mombasa Tusks, a famous landmark consisting of a pair of giant tusks over the highway. We also took a walk in a nearby park, which was very nice, but we also noticed there were many bats sleeping in the trees above! There were so many bats, and they were quite noisy!
We then toured a spice market in the Old Town, seeking to try local fruit and potentially buy spices. I tried jackfruit, which was very good, if I can describe it, it tastes like a combination of a banana and citrus. The spices smelled so good, and there was such a wide variety of them across all of the vendors, the market definitely proved to be a great time.
After that, we headed off to our main objective of the day: Revital Manufacturing. Revital is a medical device manufacturing company situated an hour north of Mombasa, which specializes in disposable medical devices, mostly syringes, blood tubes, and most recently, masks. The masks provided to us at our hotel were actually all manufactured locally by Revital. We met with Roneek Vora, the Director of Sales, Marketing, and R&D, who sat us down with the executive team, as we learned about Revital. It was founded in 2008, originally as a sugar manufacturing plant. However, as they saw a need for locally made medical devices, since up to 90% of Africa's medical devices are imported, they pivoted, purchasing new equipment, and now, they are the largest manufacturer of disposable medical equipment in Africa. They distribute all across Eastern and Central Africa, and were very adamant about helping provide equipment for relief during the Covid-19 pandemic, manufacturing masks and antigen tests. Now, they are looking to pivot into lab testing equipment, creating tests for HIV, pregnancy, cancer, and so on.
Roneek then took us for lunch at a villa that the company rents nearby to do work at and to host guests. We talked more about the potential that Revital has to help in Africa, as their big push is in locally manufactured equipment, because it is cheaper and can benefit local communities, since it is just as good, if not better, than competing devices that are imported. Roneek then gave us a tour of the factory, where we saw all of the machines used to mold the plastics and shape them into syringes and tubes, as well as the process they use to make reliable face masks, being so good, that they are now exporting them to UNICEF suppliers. Revital is clearly on the way to having an extremely large impact on the African healthcare market long term, as their model is absolutely sustainable and doable, as they have confidently demonstrated to us during our time there. We parted ways, and they gave us four packs of face masks and an antigen test kit as souveniers.
With our time at Revital finished, we headed for the Mombasa Airport to catch our flight back to Nairobi. It was a very quick, one hour flight, which had no problems at all.
We ended the day right back where we started, but we still had two more days before we would leave Kenya.