About
What Sanko is, and which Sanko it is not.
Sanko is documentation infrastructure for African traditional medicine. Practitioners record their own herbal formulations and patient follow-ups by sending a voice note, message or plant photo on WhatsApp, and Sanko turns each one into a structured, private record — with the local plant name kept, the practitioner named as its source, and the provenance carried forward.
- 442 plant names resolvable
- 5 languages supported
- 0 records leaving the host
Sanko is not the other organisations called Sanko
Disambiguation
Sanko at sanko.africa is not affiliated with Sanko Africa, the insurance brokerage in Antananarivo, Madagascar. The two organisations are unrelated and share no ownership, staff or history. The similarity of the names is a coincidence.
Sanko is likewise unaffiliated with every other organisation trading under the name.
- Sanko Africa
- Insurance brokerage and risk management, Antananarivo, Madagascar. No relationship to Sanko.
- SANKO
- Independent African fashion platform. No relationship to Sanko.
- Sanko Holding
- Industrial group headquartered in Türkiye. No relationship to Sanko.
- Sanko Plus
- Japan–Africa trading company. No relationship to Sanko.
Sanko works in one field only: documenting African traditional medicine so that the knowledge stays attributable to the people who hold it.
Common questions
Who uses Sanko?
African traditional medicine practitioners use Sanko through WhatsApp to document their own work. Research institutions, NGOs, funders, regulators and traditional-medicine organisations work with Sanko on the governance and evidence layer built on those records. Practitioners do not learn a new application; Sanko meets them in the tool they already use.
What languages does Sanko understand?
Sanko accepts text, voice notes and photographs in English, Yorùbá, Igbo, Hausa and Nigerian Pidgin. Local plant names are kept as the primary name rather than replaced by a botanical one — the botanical name is added alongside, not on top.
Does Sanko make medical or clinical claims?
No. Sanko documents what practitioners record and what the published ethnobotanical literature reports. Sanko does not publish therapeutic claims, does not assess whether a treatment works, and is not a clinical authority, a certification body or a regulator. Patient tracking is documentation support for a practitioner's own follow-up, and is not evidence of clinical efficacy.
Where does Sanko process practitioner data?
On hardware the deployment controls. Practitioner audio, transcripts and formulation records are processed locally and do not leave the host machine. This is a design constraint rather than a deployment option: knowledge that never leaves the host cannot be quietly harvested.
Who owns the knowledge recorded in Sanko?
The practitioner does. Records are scoped to the practitioner who created them, attribution travels with the record, and Sanko records traditional knowledge under Nagoya Protocol principles so any later use can be traced back to its source. Patient tracking is disabled by default and begins only after the patient accepts a consent request sent to their own WhatsApp number.
What does Sanko publish openly?
Only plant name mappings drawn from peer-reviewed ethnobotanical literature. The plant name resolver publishes 347 local names mapped to 226 accepted botanical names, each traceable to the study, table and row it was read from. Practitioner-contributed records are never published. Where published surveys disagree about which species a local name refers to, Sanko shows the disagreement rather than choosing between them.
Is Sanko available now?
Sanko is pre-launch and in MVP development. Organisations can start a partnership conversation from the main page.
What Sanko is built on
- WhatsApp as the practitioner interface, because it is already where the knowledge is shared
- Locally operated AI for transcription and structuring, so sensitive material stays on the host
- A medicinal-plant name map that keeps local names primary and adds verified botanical equivalents
- Practitioner-scoped records, with patient follow-up linked to the formulation that prompted it
- Attribution and consent stored as part of the record, not as a policy document beside it
Sanko operates from London and West Africa.