|Chinwendu Nwani
When the World Health Organisation published its 2023 report on digital health transformation in low- and middle-income countries, one of its central findings was striking in its simplicity: the gap between life-saving health information and the populations who needed it was not primarily a scientific gap. It was a communication gap. Data existed. Research existed. What was missing, in far too many cases, was the capacity to translate complex biological and epidemiological knowledge into visual language that ordinary people could understand, trust, and act on. That finding sits at the heart of why a motion designer named Abdulmajeed Bello has become one of the more quietly significant figures operating at the intersection of design and health technology in Nigeria today.
Abdukmajeed holds a Bachelor of Science in Biological Science, a credential that might seem incongruous on the portfolio of a motion graphics specialist. In practice, it is the detail that makes him genuinely unusual, and genuinely valuable. His undergraduate training gave him something that most designers working in health tech must spend years acquiring secondhand: an intuitive literacy in the language of biological systems. He understands cellular processes, disease pathways, and pharmacological mechanisms not as abstract concepts to be translated for him by a client brief, but as familiar intellectual territory. When he sits down to design an animated explainer about how a vaccine triggers an immune response, or how a diagnostic algorithm processes patient data, he is not approximating scientific accuracy. He is working from the inside out.
This matters enormously in the context of African health technology, a sector that has grown at a pace that has surprised even its most optimistic advocates. Companies like Helium Health, which provides electronic medical record systems across sub-Saharan Africa, and Reliance Health, which has built integrated health insurance and care platforms operating across Nigeria and Egypt, are producing tools and services that require clear, accessible communication to function effectively. Patients need to understand their digital health records. Community health workers need training materials that convey clinical protocols without ambiguity. Investors and regulators need to grasp the mechanics of platforms they are being asked to fund or approve. In every one of these contexts, the quality of the visual communication is not cosmetic. It is operational. Abdukmajeed’s work exists precisely in these gaps. Motion graphics, his primary discipline, is a medium particularly well suited to health communication because it can show processes unfolding in time. A static diagram can illustrate a structure; animation can illustrate causality, sequence, and change. The difference between showing what malaria looks like and showing how the Plasmodium parasite invades a red blood cell is the difference between information and understanding. Across various health tech projects, Bello has demonstrated a consistent ability to make that second kind of visual argument, one where the scientific logic of a process is not merely referenced but made visible and legible.
What makes his profile compelling beyond the Nigerian context is that the challenge he addresses is genuinely global, even if it manifests with particular urgency in Africa. In the United Kingdom, the NHS has invested heavily in digital health infrastructure, yet continues to struggle with patient engagement across populations with varying levels of digital and health literacy. In the United States, health communication failures contributed materially to disparities in COVID-19 vaccination uptake. The design of health information is a problem that wealthy health systems have not solved either, which means that practitioners who bring genuine scientific grounding to the work are in demand well beyond the continent where Bello is currently building his practice.
The broader design industry has begun to recognise this. Design Week and Creative Review have both, in recent years, expanded their coverage of design in contexts outside Europe and North America, and health technology has featured prominently in that expansion. TechCabal, which has established itself as the authoritative voice on technology and innovation across Africa, has documented the growth of health tech ecosystems in Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, and Kigali with increasing depth and sophistication. What these publications have covered less thoroughly is the specific question of who is doing the design work inside these ecosystems, and what expertise they are bringing to it. Abdulmajeed’s profile begins to answer that question in a way that is both specific and representative of a generation of African designers who are arriving in professional practice with cross-disciplinary formations that the industry did not plan for but very much needs.
There is also a pedagogical dimension to his story that deserves attention. The pathway from a science degree to a design career is not well mapped in Nigeria or across most of Africa. Art schools and design programmes rarely recruit from science faculties. Science departments do not typically flag design as a credible professional destination for their graduates. Bello’s trajectory, from a university biology programme to motion graphics and health tech, is the kind of career path that becomes easier for others once someone has already walked it and made it visible. His existence as a practitioner is, in a modest but real sense, an argument for curricular reform and a broader conception of where scientific training can lead.
For editors at publications working at the intersection of design, technology, and African innovation, Abdulmajeed Bello represents exactly the kind of source that makes a story feel both timely and structurally important. He is not a spokesperson for a trend. He is a practitioner whose specific formation, a biological scientist who became a motion designer working in health technology, illuminates something true and underreported about how the most consequential design challenges of this moment are actually being met. The WHO was right that the gap is a communication gap. What it did not say, but what Bello’s work quietly demonstrates, is that closing it requires designers who can think like scientists, and scientists who were brave enough to become designers.
