Notes from Africa 2100’s October webinar with Dr. Brandy Young, the analytical chemist who founded Certainty Analytical Labs.
Most of us never think about the lab behind a test result. A doctor adjusts a transplant patient’s medication, a manufacturer decides whether a batch is safe to release, a food producer tries to show that a shipment meets a buyer’s standards. Each decision rests on a number from a laboratory the person acting on it will probably never see.
Dr. Brandy Young has spent more than fifteen years inside those laboratories. In our October webinar she said a lab’s real product isn’t data. It’s trust. A client sends in a sample, and what they need back is enough confidence to make a decision.
Dr. Young earned her undergraduate degree at Hampton University and her PhD in analytical chemistry at Purdue, and she now leads Certainty Analytical Labs, a compliance testing lab in Rochester, New York. Thank you, Dr. Young, for an hour of unusually candid answers.
Every Result Has a History
Nsisuk asked her to explain how a result can be accurate but not true, and she answered with a hemp farmer example. He harvests a 5,000-gram lot of one variety and sends a sample to the lab, which needs only one gram. That gram can be measured accurately and precisely, and the result defended. But if it doesn’t represent the whole lot, and the product goes to market labeled at 10% potency on the strength of it, the product is mislabeled. Nothing went wrong at the instrument. The problem was whether the sample stood for the thing the decision was about.
A number, she said, begins with a sample, which passes through a method, run by people inside a quality system who make assumptions and follow decision rules. Every downstream step can be done well and still produce the wrong answer if the first one was wrong.
We’ve had our own version of this. In “Beyond the First Few Weeks,” our October programs update, we wrote that an account or an enrollment is a real step but doesn’t tell us whether someone is learning. The figures were correct. The work was in being clear about what they showed and what they didn’t.
Building Trust Into the System
Labs work under pressure to produce particular answers, because a result can make or break a client’s business. “We can’t just tell clients what they want to hear,” she said, “and trust and believe we get a lot of pressure like that.” Her answer is to rely on systems built in advance.
Certainty’s clients require it to be accredited to ISO/IEC 17025, the international standard for testing labs. Getting there was expensive and stressful, and at first she treated it as a box to check. Then she saw what it had made her build. Under the rules, for example, an analyst running a client’s sample can’t interact with that client, and any interaction that does happen has to be documented along with its risk. With rules like that written down, many decisions are made before they come up. She joked that she relies on systems because she’s lazy and doesn’t want to make a whole lot of decisions.
Systems aren’t the whole of it, though. Asked how an entrepreneur builds public trust, she pointed to buy-in, transparency, and a shared understanding among everyone at the table. “That’s a lot of work,” she said. “It just doesn’t happen once.”
Talent Without Infrastructure
In Cape Town, where she spent several years in infectious disease research, Dr. Young worked alongside African scientists she counts among the most talented she has known. What they lacked was the infrastructure around them. A mass spectrometer can list at around half a million dollars, she said, but buying one doesn’t make a good lab. A lab needs trained people, sound methods, reliable supply chains, leadership, and a way to sustain itself.
From there she drew what she called a very natural connection with Africa 2100: scientific infrastructure is economic infrastructure. Pharmaceutical manufacturing, food exports, environmental protection, and public health all depend on trusted local testing. For a founder, a lab that’s far away or hard to reach means longer waits, higher costs, and a harder time showing buyers and regulators that a product is what it claims to be. A local lab doesn’t guarantee market access, but it puts the evidence and expertise within reach. Labs also employ far more than PhDs: technicians, quality staff, sample managers, data and regulatory specialists, and operations people.
Asked how Certainty could help Africa 2100 founders in the food sector who want to sell into the United States, she said requirements depend on the product and are currently in flux, and that a lab like hers can act as a consulting partner on which boxes need checking, why, and at what cost.
A System Someone Else Can Run
Dr. Young’s aim is not to export testing to Africa but to build local capacity led by people from the countries it serves. Her model is what she calls a “lab in a box.” Certainty takes a single validated test, such as heavy metals in water, and packages it with its documentation, market research, processes, unit economics, training, business development support, and Certainty’s network, so another operator can license it and stand up the same service somewhere new. Each location would still face its own regulators, and she was open that it’s early days: “I’m building a lot of the pieces.”
The people come through training. Certainty runs a pipeline program with a university in Rochester, and she is working with the University of Cape Town on a similar pathway. Further out, she described a flagship African lab that would serve as a regional hub and training ground, with South Africa the first place she is considering. She called it a vision still being worked out, and said Certainty is raising half a million dollars over the next six months for infrastructure.
Leading Beyond Your Expertise
Chudi asked her to compare the scientist’s path with the entrepreneur’s. Her answer began with her late aunt, who always said, “Just give it to Brandy, let her fix it,” and with what it meant, as a young Black girl, to grow up around people who expected her to succeed.
The business world was different. At her first pitch, one man grew excited about the idea and how much money it could make, and then told her, “But you’re not the CEO.” It made her angry, though she didn’t let it show, and it shook her confidence. She still thinks he was wrong. In time, she came to see that business people speak a different language and mostly want to make money, and she learned to be clear about what she knows very well, honest about what she doesn’t, and OK with working out what she needs to get to the answers. She called it something she’s still learning.
Certainty, she said, is the only woman-owned, Black-owned lab permitted in New York State to do much of the testing it does, and people don’t expect her when she walks in. She sees that as part of what the lab brings: talent and communities that have been overlooked in how labs are built and run.
Ali, joining from Ghana, asked how she manages the fear that comes with dreams this size. Her advice wasn’t that the fear goes away. It was that thinking too hard can stop you from ever starting, and that once you decide, you keep going, assessing the risk as you go, and try to enjoy the process. Then she put it in a line: “If you have the title of entrepreneur, fear can’t reside in that same space.”
What Came Up in the Room
Michael spoke about his friend Joseph, a lab technician Michael is helping to build laboratory services in rural Kenya, where, Michael said, people sometimes travel 200 kilometers for a basic ultrasound or tuberculosis test. Dr. Young said problems like these will be solved by people like Joseph and welcomed the conversation. Michael plans to share her contact details with him. It’s too early to say where that leads.
Why This Matters to Africa 2100
Africa 2100 starts from the view that the continent lacks trust infrastructure, not talent. Dr. Young reached the same conclusion in a lab in Cape Town, and her hour with us showed the unglamorous work that earns that trust: a sample that represents the lot, procedures written before anyone needs them, and people trained to run them.
Thank you, Dr. Young, for showing us what sits behind the number.
Your Turn
If you joined us, look out for the feedback form in your inbox.
Whether or not you were there, we’d like an example from your own work. What is one piece of infrastructure, such as reliable testing, financing, a mentor, or a way to reach customers, that helped you turn what you know into real opportunity? And what is missing where you live or work? Write to us at he***@********00.org.
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