Revolutionizing Healthcare in West Africa

By developing people centric and data-driven technology solutions, eHealth Africa is able to deliver better public health services for vulnerable communities.

Cutting edge technology in our world has led to self-driving cars and phones that can be unlocked with our fingerprints. What about technology in the context of healthcare? eHealth Africa has brought cutting edge technological solutions to African communities susceptible to illness. In their 7 years of existence, they have streamlined polio immunisation in Nigeria, combatted the Ebola outbreak, and provided over 800 jobs across four African countries.

We recently had a conversation with Geerd-Dietger Hoffman, the CTO of eHealth Africa, and learned about their successes so far, what people can do to help and what’s next for the innovative healthcare technology company.

What was the motivation for starting eHealth Africa?

eHealth Africa (eHA) was founded in 2009 by Evelyn Castle and Adam Thompson. At this time, they both looked back at several years of experience leading large-scale public health and IT projects, some of which were based in West Africa. They believed that Northern Nigeria’s underdeveloped public health infrastructure could make a substantial leap if supported by innovative data-driven technology solutions that would allow for a digitisation of health data as well reliable and nearly real-time data transmission and reporting.

eHealth Africa was founded in 2009. What has been your social impact to date?

We helped Nigeria’s government streamline and strengthen the polio immunisation by providing data to the vaccinators for reaching their targets as well as reporting tools. Thus, Nigeria is close to being declared polio-free by the WHO, making the whole of Africa officially polio-free. Further, eHA played a crucial role in the Ebola outbreak response by rapidly building emergency operations centers that coordinated cases-reporting and follow-ups. As one of the results, Ebola outbreak in Lagos could be limited to 20 cases only. We have further established and operated reliable health emergency hotlines in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Additionally, we have been able to provide over 800 meaningful jobs across our four countries of operation (Nigeria, Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone), a region with very high levels of unemployment.

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Author: Mark Salenga