About VMLS

Our Story

In 2003, a secondary school leaver spent a gap year in a missions organised school for children in a village where her dad, missionary Nathaniel Abimbola had evangelised and started a fellowship for new converts. Her mum too had started literacy classes for the villagers on Sundays; which she continued during the week with a class of about 30 children. She would go to the village and stay for days with them and there she saw that they drank water from the same rivers that waste and excreta flowed in. So, she started teaching the villagers how to boil their water before drinking and how to dig makeshift pit toilets rather than go to the river. Then, she also observed how difficult it was for the villagers to access basic healthcare. Worse, child mortality was high at the time. Before she left for further studies, there were improvements in the community's life, but no clinics and no school.

When she gained admission to the University to study Medical Laboratory Science at the University College Hospital Ibadan,, she raised her hand during orientation and asked if the knowledge she would gain from the course would be useful in the village to improve community health and was told that medical laboratory investigations formed the bedrock of medical diagnosis and treatment, she was excited and chose to stay.

In 2015, shortly after she had graduated as a Medical Laboratory Scientist and was back to Ogun State, she decided to organise a medical outreach in that community. Then, she faced another hurdle, many of her colleagues she approached were not familiar with the concept of volunteerism and wanted to know how much the day's job at the outreach would pay. That was the seed for the start of Volunteer Medical Laboratory Scientists.

The vision was to create a safe space by Medical Laboratory Scientists for Medical Laboratory Professionals and students, improve healthcare access at the local community level and promote health equity through volunteerism.