By Malcolm Quigley, Director of Strategic Partnerships, PSI
The world does not have an innovation problem in women’s health. We have a scale problem.
Across reproductive health, diagnostics, menstrual health, and digital self-care, we are living in a genuinely exciting moment. Entrepreneurs are building remarkable solutions. Investors are paying attention. Yet the women who need these innovations most are still waiting.
That contradiction is exactly why PSI is building the NEXUS Accelerator.
The Scale of the Problem
The unmet need in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is staggering: 257 million women lack access to contraception and 350,000 preventable unsafe abortions occur in LMICs every year. Cervical cancer accounts for 94% of its global deaths in these same markets. One in three menstruators lacks consistent access to period products.
These are not abstract statistics. They represent preventable deaths, untreated conditions, lost income, interrupted education and millions of women navigating daily health challenges without affordable solutions because innovation is not reaching these populations.
Why Capital Isn’t Moving
The money isn’t absent. The interest isn’t absent. What’s missing is the infrastructure to connect intention with action.
When PSI spoke directly with femtech founders and impact investors, the barriers they cited, such as pricing complexity, regulatory fragmentation, and investor resistance, are real, but often less prohibited than assumed. The deeper truth? LMIC expansion isn’t failing because it can’t work. It’s stalling because successful pathways are invisible.
For investors, the hesitation is rarely ideological. Most want to fund women’s health solutions in underserved markets. But they’re operating with incomplete intelligence and fragmented deal flow. They want validated demand, credible distribution, realistic unit economics. Too few organisations are building the structures that provide exactly that.
What NEXUS Does
NEXUS is PSI’s accelerator for women’s health innovation in LMICs that is built to turn promising ideas into scalable, investable solutions that deliver both impact and financial return.
For innovators, NEXUS provides the operational and market infrastructure most early-stage companies lack: deep market intelligence, real user insights, regulatory navigation and go-to-market strategies that are executable, not aspirational.
PSI’s STAR initiative scaled HIV self-testing, self-injectable contraception and diagnostics across dozens of LMIC markets. The Initiative distributed over 6 million HIV self-test kits across 16 markets and drove down the price to under USD$2. Starting from a market with no prequalified products and only 3 countries with supportive policies, PSI catalysed a global transformation that expanded policy adoption to 108 countries and brought multiple WHO-prequalified products to market. That institutional knowledge is what NEXUS makes available to founders navigating these contexts for the first time.
For investors, NEXUS offers clearer market signals that help distinguish perceived risk from real risk. It offers a curated deal-flow source, a due diligence and risk assessment accelerator, and a co-investment coordinator that delivers pipeline quality, market validation, and minimizes risk during execution so that capital can be deployed with confidence.
Why This Matters Now
We are at an inflection point. Investment in women’s health is growing rapidly, but its long-term success depends on whether innovation reaches the women too often excluded from health markets altogether. LMIC markets cannot be an afterthought, retrofitted into a solution after the fact. They must be built into innovation strategies from the beginning.
Innovations designed for both high-income and low-income markets in mind are more likely to scale, reach affordability faster, and deliver long-term commercial viability. That is what NEXUS is designed to do: help founders scale responsibly, help investors deploy capital confidently, and help proven innovations reach the women who need them most.
The innovation is here. The women are waiting. Now we need the systems, partnerships, and capital to close the gap.
To learn more about NEXUS or explore partnership opportunities, contact Malcolm Quigley.
