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On strengthening digital health systems, disease surveillance, emergency preparedness and response, M&E, and what working inside these systems actually teaches you.
Featured Series
Nine essays on what nine years inside WHO Nigeria and Nigeria's health systems actually teach you: on data, coordination, community, and what persists when the funding ends.
Every African Union member state has formally adopted the Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response framework. Most have IDSR-aligned reporting tools, IDSR-trained personnel, and IDSR-based national surveillance guidelines. Yet when outbreaks occur across West Africa, response gaps appear at precisely the points the IDSR framework was designed to close.
Moving immunisation data quality from 54% to 81% across all reporting sites in the WHO polio programmes did not come from training health workers to enter data more carefully. It came from redesigning the system so that poor data quality was harder to produce than good data quality. Data quality is a design problem with a design solution.
The question I ask every time I review a DHIS2 instance: who opens this dashboard at 7am on a Monday morning, and what decision do they need to make within the next hour? If the person who built the dashboard cannot answer that, it is not a decision-support tool. It is a data display.
Africa's healthcare challenges are immense, but so is the opportunity to leapfrog legacy systems with digital-first health innovation. Here's why now.
Lessons from investigating 231 suspected Mpox cases across 27 LGAs in Imo State, and what the data tells us about the future of disease surveillance in Nigeria.
More articles in progress. Topics include community health systems, eHealth implementation, and lessons from outbreak response.
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