Sanko Ltd · United Kingdom

Evidence infrastructure for African Traditional Medicine.

A digital layer for documentation, credentialing, and compliance — built for practitioners, regulators, and researchers working with African materia medica.

Take the practitioner survey See the 2030 vision

Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi.

Reach back, get it, and move forward.

The problem

A global classification system that does not yet describe African practice.

The World Health Organization's classification of traditional medicine has expanded twice in three years. African Traditional Medicine is not yet represented in either revision — there is no published module, no drafting timeline, and no claimed institutional partner.

Without a shared vocabulary, African practice is excluded from clinical coding, insurance schemes, regulatory frameworks, and the comparative evidence base that now governs traditional medicine internationally.

Module 1 · in force Jan 2022 346 Categories covering Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean medicine (150 disorders, 196 patterns).

Module 2 · WHO 2025 update 529 Categories covering Ayurveda, Siddha, and Unani — added 14 February 2025.

African Traditional Medicine None No module, no published drafting timeline, no claimed partner.

ICD-11 Chapter 26 Module 1 — BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 2022 (PMC9248085).
ICD-11 TM Module 2 — WHO ICD-11 2025 update (14 February 2025); Ministry of Ayush, Government of India (19 February 2025).

What we are building

Three layers, one record of practice.

Sanko is in development. The layers below describe the system we are building, not a deployed product.

Vault

A structured record for practitioners — formulations, preparation methods, provenance of plant material, and case notes — held under the practitioner's own custody.

ii.

Evidence

A standards-aligned schema that lets observations from practice connect to ICD-11, herbarium identifiers, and the published pharmacological literature.

iii.

Connect

Permissioned channels through which practitioners, researchers, and commercial buyers can exchange evidence-graded information without surrendering ownership of it.

Why now

Four shifts in the last twelve months.

26 May 2025
The WHO Global Traditional Medicine Strategy 2025–2034 was adopted by the Seventy-eighth World Health Assembly and published by WHO in October 2025.
14 Feb 2025
The ICD-11 2025 update added Module 2 covering Ayurveda, Siddha, and Unani — 529 categories. African Traditional Medicine still has no comparable module.
Jan 2026
Nigeria's NNMDA announced a nationwide traditional medicine practitioner database, with a pilot in Iseyin LGA, Oyo State.
Dec 2025
NNMDA Director-General Prof. Martins Emeje was appointed Co-Chair of WHO's Strategic and Technical Advisory Group on Traditional, Complementary and Integrative Medicine (STAG-TM).

The window is open.

Founder

Felix Olajide Ayeni

Technical Founder

Clinical: Master Herbalist, CNM London
Research: PhD researcher, LJMU Centre for Natural Products Discovery
Analytical: MSc Data Science
Lineage: Yemkem International (1981)

Get involved

Start here.

Practitioners

If you practise African Traditional Medicine — in clinic, in market, or in community — the survey shapes what Sanko documents first.

Take the practitioner survey