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The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted critical health services in Africa and undermined years of progress in fighting other diseases, such as HIV, Tuberculosis, and malar?ia. In coping with these challenges, medical pro?fessionals and facilities worldwide adopted tele?health appointments to facilitate access to care and utilized big data and machine learning tools for COVID-related contact tracing and prevention.

The pandemic has provided an unprecedented opportunity for African countries to harness the potential of digitalization and technological inno?vation to strengthen their public health systems with a forward-looking approach and improve the well-being of their citizens against future outbreaks. This policy brief highlights the important digital health tools implemented by African countries and provide recommendations on future priority policy actions by African governments and the UN system to catalyze digital innovation for public health.

As part of the consultation process, OSAA organized a recorded expert conversation in December 2022, with public health officials, digitalization experts, and academics to discuss the challenges and opportunities to digitalize Africa’s public health systems. The discussions and lessons learned from the recorded expert conversation will help distill policy recommendations for African governments, private sector, and the international community. Experts included:

Prof. Edith Phaswana, Director of Graduate Academic Programmes at the Thabo Mbeki African School of Public & International Affairs (TM-School) at University of South Africa

Dr. Derrick Muneene, Unit Head, Digital Health Capacity Building and Collaboration, Digital Health and Innovation Department, WHO Headquarters in Geneva

Ms. Ida Jallow, Senior Liaison Officer to the UN, International Telecommunication Union (ITU)

Mr. Victor Akinwande, Research Engineer, AI Science, IBM Research; PhD Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University

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