Africa has long been described as a continent with a healthcare problem. I prefer to see it as a continent with an extraordinary digital health opportunity.
The scale of the challenge is real. Nigeria alone has a doctor-to-patient ratio of approximately 4 per 10,000 people, compared to the WHO recommended minimum of 10. Health facilities are concentrated in urban centres. Supply chains for essential medicines are fragile. Paper-based records make continuity of care nearly impossible.
But here is what is different in 2024: mobile penetration across sub-Saharan Africa has crossed 50%, with smartphone adoption accelerating. Nigeria has over 200 million active SIM cards. Broadband infrastructure is expanding. And critically, a generation of African health professionals trained in public health informatics, data science, and digital systems is entering the workforce.
This creates the conditions for a genuine leapfrog moment. Just as Africa skipped landlines and went straight to mobile, we have the opportunity to skip paper-based health records and go straight to integrated digital health systems.
The most promising areas I see are three. First, community health worker (CHW) digital tools, mobile applications that allow community health workers to document patient encounters, flag danger signs, and communicate with facility-based providers in real time. This is not theoretical. DHIS2 deployments across Nigeria have shown that simple, well-designed mobile tools dramatically increase the completeness and timeliness of health data from communities.
Second, disease surveillance platforms. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how fragile our surveillance infrastructure was. But it also accelerated investment in digital outbreak detection. Platforms that aggregate signals from multiple sources, health facility reports, community surveillance, laboratory results, and environmental data, can dramatically reduce the time between first case and public health response.
Third, M&E digitisation. Too many health programmes still collect evaluation data on paper, then manually enter it into spreadsheets. This introduces errors, delays, and makes real-time decision-making impossible. Digital M&E tools, properly implemented, can compress the feedback loop from months to days.
What holds us back is not technology. Technology exists and in many cases is already deployed. What holds us back is implementation quality, user adoption, and sustainability. Digital health tools that are not co-designed with the communities they serve fail consistently, regardless of how elegant the technology is.
The path forward requires public health professionals who understand both health systems and digital systems, who can sit at the intersection and translate between them. That is the role I have committed to, and the reason digital health advocacy has become central to my work.
Africa does not need to replicate Western health systems. We have the opportunity to build something better, and digital health is the infrastructure on which that something better will be built.