🎯 The business: a trading company for low-risk Class I medical consumables (exam gloves, gauze, syringes, drapes, basic instruments) sold to medical distributors in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, who supply clinics and hospitals that want FDA-registered basics at a fair price. The full medical game plan is in this section.
Licensed medical distributors in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Kampala, mission hospitals and the NGOs that supply them. Orders start at a mixed pallet of $8,000 to $15,000 and grow to containers. Margins on consumables are thin, 10 to 20 percent, so this is a volume and reliability business; the distributor who gets the right boxes on the promised date reorders every quarter.
| LLC, licenses, insurance | $2,000 |
| Regulatory consult (two hours) on FDA export rules and destination registration | $600 |
| Catalog, site, samples | $1,200 |
| Gold Key in Nairobi and a Medic East Africa visit (STEP grants can refund much of it) | $4,000 |
| Working capital for the first mixed pallet | $8,000 |
| All-in | ≈ $12,000 to $16,000 |
Open accounts with two or three U.S. medical wholesalers that sell to exporters. Learn what each destination requires for imported medical devices (Kenya’s Pharmacy and Poisons Board registers devices; Tanzania and Uganda have their equivalents) and what your distributor, as the local license holder, needs from you. Apply for a STEP grant through your state. Book a Gold Key in Nairobi. Build a price list with landed estimates.
A $12,000 pallet at a 15 percent margin is $1,800. Two pallets a month is a side business; a container a month at $60,000 is $9,000 of margin and a real company. The first year is about becoming the reliable supplier to two or three distributors; margin improves when you buy in volume and consolidate freight.
FDA rules for exporting devices (Class I items that are legally marketed in the U.S. can be exported freely; some buyers want an FDA Certificate to Foreign Government), destination product registration held by your distributor, sterile products’ shelf-life and storage rules, screening buyers against restricted lists, and payment by letter of credit or in advance. Never sell what you cannot document.
A registration your distributor said they had and did not. Port clearance delays that cost demurrage. A competitor from Asia at half your price; your answer is documentation and reliability, not price. Fraudulent tenders, which are common in this sector. The traders who last pick two distributors, document everything, and grow one container at a time.