6th Africa Digital Health Summit (ADHS 2026)

SUMMIT PARTICIPATION REPORT

6th Africa Digital Health Summit (ADHS 2026)

“From Pilots to Scale: Growing Africa’s Digital Health Innovation Ecosystem”

 

Abuja Continental Hotel, Abuja, FCT

25th – 26th June 2026

Submitted to: ACIOE Foundation

Prepared by: Adenike Badiora, Advocacy Lead, ACIOE Foundation

 

 

Report date: 29 June 2026

 

1. Purpose and Background

I attended the 6th Africa Digital Health Summit (ADHS 2026), held on 25^th – 26th June 2026 at the Abuja Continental Hotel, Abuja FCT, as Advocacy Lead for ACIOE Foundation. My attendance was sponsored by ACIOE Foundation, in line with the Foundation’s ongoing advocacy for national and subnational governments in Nigeria to adopt, absorb, and integrate proven, scalable digital health innovations implemented by MSD for Mothers collaborators and partners.

The Summit was convened by Premier Health Systems Consult (PHS Consult) under the theme “From Pilots to Scale: Growing Africa’s Digital Health Innovation Ecosystem,” and was hosted by the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, with the World Health Organization (WHO) as Technical Co-Host and UNFPA among the lead partners. Other partners included eHealth Africa, Sydani Group, SCIDaR, Jhpiego, PharmAccess, and the Health Federation of Nigeria (HFN).

This report consolidates my notes and observations from the plenaries, panel discussions, side events, and scientific sessions attended over the two days, and sets out implications and recommendations for ACIOE Foundation’s digital health advocacy work.

2. Summit Overview

2.1 Key Facts

Item	Detail
Theme	From Pilots to Scale: Growing Africa’s Digital Health Innovation Ecosystem
Dates	Thursday 25 – Friday 26 June 2026
Venue	Abuja Continental Hotel, Abuja, FCT
Host	Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare
Technical Co-Host	World Health Organization (WHO) Nigeria
Convener	PHS Consult (Dr Niyi Osamiluyi, CEO)
Key Partners	UNFPA, eHealth Africa, Sydani Group, SCIDaR, Jhpiego, PharmAccess, Health Federation of Nigeria (HFN)
Keynote Speaker	Dr Ahmed Ogwell (Ogwel), CEO & President, VillageReach; former Deputy Director-General, Africa CDC

2.2 High-Level Patronage

The Summit carried strong government backing. Goodwill messages were delivered on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, the FCT Health and Social Health Effort Scheme (FCT HSES), NCDC, WHO, UNICEF, the EU, and FCDO. The Summit was formally opened by Dr Iziaq Adekunle Salako, Honourable Minister of State for Health and Social Welfare, following the keynote address by Dr Ahmed Ogwell.

 

2.3 Programme Structure

The two-day programme combined ten scientific presentation sessions (over 130 abstracts and posters spanning AI in health, digital supply chains, telemedicine, maternal and child health digital tools, and health workforce digitalisation), four to five plenary panel discussions per day, multiple sponsored side events, an Innovators Pitch Session, and a Ministerial Policy Dialogue on Digital Health Transformation on Day 2.

Day 1 opened with the National Anthem, an Opening Ceremony, goodwill messages, the keynote address, and the Minister’s official declaration of opening, followed immediately by sponsored panel sessions on institutionalising AI in African health systems and AI governance. Day 2 began with a Ministerial Policy Dialogue, followed by a keynote lecture from Prof. Yunkap Kwankam, and a dense schedule of sponsored sessions, side events, and closing plenary.

3. Keynote Address — Dr Ahmed Ogwell, CEO & President, VillageReach

Dr Ogwell’s keynote framed the entire Summit’s central tension: Africa’s abundance of pilot-stage digital health innovation versus its persistent failure to scale that innovation into lasting system change.

3.1 The Scale of the Challenge

He opened with a stark figure: 675 million people across the African continent still lack access to quality healthcare. He attributed this not to a lack of effort, but to three interlocking barriers – a lack of trust, a lack of access, and the cost of healthcare itself. He stated plainly that Africa has no shortage of innovation; what it lacks is the ability to take that innovation to scale.

3.2 Where Digital Health Is Already Working

• Mobile applications are already improving diagnostics.
• Digital health supply chains are tracking and protecting medicines.
• Telemedicine is putting a doctor within reach of patients who live hours from the nearest clinic.
• Digital health records are giving health systems a continuous picture of patient care for the first time.

However, he was candid that the continent has run far too many pilots and far too few have scaled -brilliant innovations that work in a single clinic or district often stall because the technology is not interoperable with the rest of the health system.

3.3 Three Hard Truths — What Technology Cannot Replace

1. Technology cannot replace trust. Dashboards and data systems will never substitute for the relationship between a health worker and the community they serve.
2. An app cannot replace the institution. Bringing technology into a health system that lacks strong institutions does not strengthen that system, it merely digitises its weaknesses.
3. Mobile apps cannot replace governance. The health worker remains the single most important link in the entire chain.

3.4 Call to Action

Dr Ogwell argued that digital tools alone will never transform a health system; transformation happens only when tools are embedded within strong health system infrastructure – the “rails” on which every dashboard, app, and electronic record must run. He closed by urging the Summit to be remembered not for the number of new pilots launched, but for the commitments made to scale what already works: building African-owned and African-funded infrastructure, investing in health workers, and closing the access gap for the 675 million still waiting.

4. Panel Discussions and Side Events — Key Notes

4.1 Panel: “Fixing the Fragmentation” — Digital Innovations for Turning Health Inefficiencies into System Change

Hosted by the Digital Connected Care Coalition (DCCC), moderated by Kwasi Boahene (Director, Health Systems, PharmAccess Amsterdam), with panelists Abimbola Adebakin (CEO, Advantage Health Africa), Chibuzo Opara (CEO & Co-founder, DrugStoc), Olamide Lawal (Group Head, Medical Services, AXA Mansard), Ekenem Isichei (Deputy Director, Policy & Advocacy, Gates Foundation), Odunayo Sanya (Executive Director, MTN Nigeria Foundation), and Femi Olapegba (Managing Director, Digital Health Platforms, Interswitch).

Access, Affordability, and Trust

Abimbola Adebakin framed the core barriers to digital health uptake as access, affordability, and trust, illustrating this with Advantage Health Africa’s online pharmacy model, “My Advantage”: customers save money on purchases that can be applied toward health insurance, and unused funds are refunded – directly tying a savings incentive to insurance uptake.

From Innovation to Integration

Ekenem Isichei observed that the sector is now being asked to do more with less, and that the conversation has shifted from generating innovation to adopting and integrating what already exists. He stressed that health data should be accessible across geographies regardless of where it was originally captured, stating that interoperability should be a baseline requirement for any digital innovation, not an afterthought – and that the test for AI as a scaling tool should be what problem does it solve and how many lives are saved, not its novelty.

Mobile Infrastructure as Health Infrastructure

Odunayo Sanya positioned the mobile phone itself as a form of health infrastructure, proposing that health insurance premiums could be deducted directly from airtime, leveraging existing telecom infrastructure and consumer behaviour to expand coverage.

Financing, Scale, and the “Last Mile”

Ekenem Isichei identified impact, scale, and sustainability as the three criteria donors now use to evaluate digital health innovation models, and posed a sharper question to the room: “who is actually receiving the funding at the last mile?” A related call was made for a Health Financing Network (HFN) focused on policy advocacy to integrate digital health solutions into existing government and financing structures.

Panel Key Takeaways

• Trust, affordability, and access remain the foundational barriers to digital health, hence digital tools must be designed around closing these gaps, not around the technology itself.
• The sector-wide shift is from generating innovation to integrating and scaling what already exists, with interoperable data as a non-negotiable baseline.
• Existing infrastructure; mobile networks, airtime billing, insurance products, all can be repurposed as health system rails rather than building parallel systems.
• Donor evaluation criteria are converging on impact, scale, and sustainability, with growing scrutiny on whether funding reaches the last mile.
• A proposed next step is establishing a Health Financing Network to drive policy advocacy for integrating digital health solutions into government systems.

4.2 Side Session: “From Pilots to Policy” — Accelerating Digital Health Integration in Nigeria and West Africa

This session focused heavily on government readiness and the institutional conditions required for digital health solutions to move beyond pilots. Key points raised in discussion:

• A central question raised was whether State governments are even ready for digital health integration.
• All governments need a clear framework for integrating digital health solutions; government readiness is what ultimately drives sustainability.
• Behavioural science should be built into digital health solution design from the outset, to promote adoption and usability.
• Change management and adoption were named as critical transformation elements that are often neglected in digital health rollouts.
• Co-creation, adaptation, designing around people, financing considerations, and access considerations were named as essential design principles.
• There is a need for total system change. The Health system must be able to absorb the innovations being introduced, not simply host them.
• Sustained funding, deliberate behaviour change efforts, and recruitment of healthcare workers with digital training were flagged as prerequisites.
• Policy and regulation were repeatedly named as the precondition for all of the above to work in practice.

Accountability Mechanisms for Scaling Digital Health Solutions

1. Financial accountability.
2. Transparency and reporting.
3. Building trust.
4. Leveraging existing apps to design solutions that keep people engaged in healthcare. For example, the principle that a banking app user should be able to pay for health insurance, access care, and talk to a health provider from within an app they already use daily.

It was noted that Nigeria’s National Digital Health Bill has passed its first reading but is still pending finalisation, and that private-sector stakeholders are largely unaware that this process is underway. This ia a notable advocacy and awareness gap.

4.3 AI Evaluation Case Study: Sauki AI

A scientific presentation (“Generative AI in Health Communication: A Case Study of Sauki AI,” Corona Management Systems, Abuja) presented evaluation results for Sauki AI, a fine-tuned LLaMA-3-8B-Instruct model trained via Predibase on 1,105 human-generated modelling summaries, built to generate stakeholder-tailored modelling briefs.

Methodology

The evaluation framework had five stages: (1) Development and Deployment: fine-tuning and iterative refinement to generate personalised briefs for diverse stakeholder audiences; (2) Evaluation against human and other LLMs: a single-blinded comparison of Sauki-, human-, and other LLM-generated (ChatGPT and DeepSeek) summaries across functionality, structure, coherence, relevance, and fidelity; (3) Qualitative Expert Evaluation: a structured rubric-based assessment of model outputs; (4) Expert Content Validation Assessment: modellers validating that AI-generated summaries retained the meaning of the original research; and (5) Participatory User Assessment: moderated usability testing with end users, complemented by thematic analysis of free-text feedback.

Key Findings

• Stakeholders could not distinguish Sauki-generated briefs from human-generated ones until explicitly informed, with no significant qualitative differences found across any of the four audience categories tested.
• Evaluation criteria: appropriate language, usefulness of insights, and conciseness were rated comparable across both Sauki and human briefs.
• Human-written briefs showed more inconsistency and individual writer bias, particularly in early training cycles; Sauki’s structured, template-driven output was seen as more consistent and reliable across papers.
• Compared with GPT-4 and DeepSeek, academics and donors preferred Sauki’s fixed sub-headings for reliability and ease of comparison across papers.
• Ministry of Health officials preferred Sauki’s brevity, though they noted GPT-4 used less technical language (at the cost of introducing some ambiguity).
• GPT-4 and DeepSeek frequently made deductions and added policy recommendations not present in the original paper- this was flagged as a key risk for responsible AI use in health communication. Sauki, by contrast, was trained to explicitly state “no policy recommendations stated” rather than infer them, which was preferred by the modelling community.
• Non-health journalists preferred GPT-4 for generating more story angles, while health journalists preferred Sauki’s fidelity to source material.

This case study is directly relevant to ACIOE’s interest in AI-assisted advocacy and evidence communication: it demonstrates a working model for using a fine-tuned LLM to translate technical modelling outputs into audience-specific advocacy or policy briefs, while explicitly guarding against AI-generated overreach into unsupported policy recommendations.

5. Major Policy Development Announced During the Summit

5.1 National Health Technology and Data Analytics Office (NHTDAO)

A Statehouse press release circulated during the Summit period (26 June 2026) announced that President Bola Tinubu has approved the establishment of the National Health Technology and Data Analytics Office (NHTDAO), and appointed Dr Obi Adigwe as its pioneer National Coordinator. The Office will be domiciled in the Office of the Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare.

Key features of the new Office, as set out in the press release:

• It will serve as a meta-level national platform for coordinating Nigeria’s digital-health agenda.
• It will reinforce, not replace, the existing statutory functions of relevant departments and agencies.
• It will harmonise and empower public and private institutions across the health system, set interoperability standards, and operationalise the National Digital Health Architecture, which was approved by the National Council on Health in November 2025.

The NHTDAO Steering Committee includes the Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare (Co-chair), the Chairman of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (Co-chair), the Minister of State for Health and Social Welfare (Alternate Co-chair), the Permanent Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, the Special Adviser to the President on Technology and Digital Economy, the National Coordinators of the SWAp Coordination Office and the Presidential Initiative to Unlock Healthcare Value Chain, the Executive Director of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency, the Director-General of the National Health Insurance Authority, a NITDA representative, six State Commissioners of Health (one per geopolitical zone), and an industry/community stakeholder representative.

Implication for ACIOE: this is a significant new institutional anchor point. The NHTDAO is the body that will set national interoperability standards and operationalise the National Digital Health Architecture, meaning future engagement on scaling MSD for Mothers-aligned digital health solutions should explicitly route through, or at minimum reference, NHTDAO’s coordinating mandate, rather than engaging only at State or Programme level. The NHTDAO should also be invited to join the conversations at the upcoming proposed National Policy Dialogue with Health sector stakeholders in Abuja.

5.2 National Digital Health Bill

Separately, it was noted in session discussion that Nigeria’s National Digital Health Bill has passed its first reading in the National Assembly but remains pending finalisation. Notably, it was flagged that private-sector digital health actors are largely unaware that this legislative process is underway, representing an awareness and advocacy gap that civil society organisations, including ACIOE, are well placed to help close.

6. Exhibition and Resource Materials Reviewed Onsite

6.1 Checklist for National Health Leaders: Digital Health for Young People

An exhibition handout (“Checklist for National Health Leaders”) set out eight “levers” for building and implementing a digitally enabled health system that addresses the needs of young people. These are summarised below as they may be useful in shaping ACIOE’s own youth-responsive digital health advocacy asks.

Lever	Focus Area	Guiding Question(s)
1	Integrated digital health solutions	Has the health system assessed whether it provides the digital health solutions young people need most, in a youth-friendly way?
2	Digital health embedded in learning and training environments	Are health-related services for young people embedded in schools, apprenticeships, community settings and universities?
3	(Digital) health, AI and social media literacy	Are young people equipped with digital, health and civic literacy skills? How are social media and youth-facing AI chatbots regulated to prevent negative impact?
4	Workforce capacity for young people’s health	Does the health workforce have the right balance of skills, and do teachers/counsellors have adequate digital health knowledge?
5	Young people’s participation and governance	Is young people’s participation ensured in the design and governance of digital health solutions created for them?
6	Equity and accessibility	Can young people access digital health solutions irrespective of location or connectivity levels?
7	Data security, privacy, safety and accountability	Do digital health policies uphold stringent privacy and data-protection standards required for young people?
8	Monitoring, evaluation and continuous improvement	Are there monitoring systems to evaluate effectiveness, efficiency, safety and accessibility of digital health solutions for young people?

7. Cross-Cutting Themes Across the Summit

• From pilots to systems: Nearly every session – scientific, panel, or side event – returned to the same underlying problem: Africa has many successful digital health pilots and very few that have scaled into national systems. The recurring barrier is not invention but absorption, financing, and institutional readiness.
• Interoperability as a baseline, not an add-on: Multiple speakers, including Ekenem Isichei of the Gates Foundation, stressed that health data must be accessible across geographies and systems by default, and several abstracts (e.g. on openEHR/HL7 FHIR frameworks) addressed this directly.
• Government and institutional readiness: Sessions repeatedly raised whether State governments have the frameworks, financing, and workforce to absorb digital health innovations – readiness, not technology, was framed as the binding constraint on sustainability. Moreso, governments should make the laws that guides the development and deployment of these innovations.
• Responsible and explainable AI: The Sauki AI case study and several scientific abstracts (on AI ethics toolkits, AI clinical decision support, and AI chatbots) reflected growing attention to guarding against AI overreach, particularly unsupported policy or clinical recommendations, while harnessing AI for efficiency.
• Mobile and financial infrastructure as health rails: Several speakers (MTN Foundation, Advantage Health Africa) proposed using existing telecom and financial infrastructure, e.g. airtime billing, savings products, etc. as delivery rails for health insurance and care access, rather than building new parallel systems.
• Strengthening institutional and policy anchors: The Summit coincided with the announcement of the NHTDAO and discussion of the pending National Digital Health Bill. Both signals that Nigeria’s digital health governance architecture is actively being built, creating a real-time opening for civil society and advocacy input.
• Maternal, child and reproductive health as a strong digital health use case: A substantial share of scientific abstracts and the dedicated Maternal Health Innovations panel addressed RMNCAH-specific digital tools (EMRs in Lagos and Bayelsa/Ondo, AI-enabled maternal platforms, digital coaching, HPV awareness gamification) which are closely aligned with ACIOE’s programmatic focus areas.

8. Implications for ACIOE Foundation’s Digital Health Advocacy

ACIOE Foundation has been leading advocacy for national and subnational governments to absorb and integrate proven, scalable digital health innovations implemented by MSD for Mothers collaborators in Nigeria. The Summit’s discussions reinforce, and in places sharpen, the direction of this work.

8.1 Strategic Alignment

• The Summit’s central theme – moving “from pilots to scale” – is precisely the gap ACIOE’s advocacy is designed to close for MSD for Mothers-aligned digital health solutions. The keynote and multiple panels validated, in a high-level public forum, the argument that the binding constraint on African digital health is absorption and institutionalisation, not invention.
• The emphasis across sessions on government readiness, financing, and policy frameworks as preconditions for scale strengthens the rationale for ACIOE’s government-facing advocacy work (national and subnational), rather than continued investment in further piloting.
• The repeated call for interoperability as a baseline requirement supports ACIOE’s positioning of MSD for Mothers digital health innovations as systems that must plug into, rather than duplicate, existing national digital health architecture.

8.2 New or Reinforced Entry Points

• The newly approved National Health Technology and Data Analytics Office (NHTDAO), under Dr Obi Adigwe, is a new, high-priority Federal entry point. Its mandate to operationalise the National Digital Health Architecture and set interoperability standards means it should be mapped into ACIOE’s stakeholder engagement plan at the national level.
• The pending National Digital Health Bill (passed first reading, not yet finalised) is an open legislative window. The session note that private-sector and civil-society actors are largely unaware that this process is ongoing is itself an advocacy opportunity. ACIOE could position itself as a source of civil-society input before the Bill is finalised.
• The proposed Health Financing Network (HFN), raised in the Fixing the Fragmentation panel as a vehicle for policy advocacy to integrate digital health into government financing structures, is a potential coalition or partnership opportunity for ACIOE to explore.
• Sponsoring/partner organisations visible at the Summit (PharmAccess, Sydani Group, SCIDaR, eHealth Africa, Gates Foundation, MTN Foundation, Jhpiego) represent a concentrated set of potential collaborators or co-advocates already active in the exact “scale-up” space ACIOE is working in.

8.3 Risks and Gaps to Address

• Government readiness is uneven and was openly questioned by Summit speakers themselves. Advocacy messaging should continue to include practical readiness-assessment tools (such as the framework levers reviewed in Section 6.1) rather than assuming political commitment alone is sufficient. Moreso subnational governments should develop or adapt their own digital health architecture and pass them into laws to drive effective digital tools integrations and sustainability.
• Several speakers flagged the risk of AI-generated content overreaching into unsupported recommendations. If ACIOE adopts AI tools (e.g. for evidence synthesis or brief generation, as demonstrated by the Sauki AI case study), the Foundation should build in explicit safeguards against the model inferring policy recommendations not grounded in the underlying evidence.
• Private-sector and civil-society awareness of ongoing federal processes (the Digital Health Bill, NHTDAO’s full operational scope) appears limited. ACIOE’s advocacy and communications strategy should factor in a deliberate information-dissemination role to close this gap among its own network and partners.

9. Recommendations for Future Work

1. Map ACIOE’s national-level advocacy engagement to the NHTDAO. Initiate formal contact with the Office of the National Coordinator (Dr Obi Adigwe) to introduce MSD for Mothers-aligned digital health innovations as candidates for alignment with the National Digital Health Architecture, and to understand NHTDAO’s emerging engagement processes for non-governmental and civil society stakeholders.
2. Track and engage on the National Digital Health Bill. Assign responsibility within ACIOE’s advocacy team to monitor the Bill’s progress through the National Assembly and identify windows for civil-society input (e.g. public hearings, stakeholder consultations) before finalisation.
3. Develop a government-readiness assessment tool for State-level advocacy. Adapt the eight-lever “Checklist for National Health Leaders” framework reviewed at the Summit (Section 6.1) into an ACIOE-branded readiness checklist tailored to MSD for Mothers digital health interventions, for use in engagements with State Ministries of Health and SPHCBs/SPHCDAs.
4. Provide Support Subnational Governments to develop Digital Health policies that drives sustainable
5. Explore participation in, or partnership with, the proposed Health Financing Network (HFN). Follow up with Gates Foundation and PharmAccess contacts from the “Fixing the Fragmentation” panel to clarify the HFN’s scope and assess strategic fit with ACIOE’s financing-integration advocacy goals.
6. Position interoperability and absorption; not novelty, as ACIOE’s core advocacy framing. Future briefs, transmittal letters, and stakeholder presentations on MSD for Mothers digital health solutions should explicitly address how each innovation integrates with existing government systems (DHIS2, national digital health architecture, State EMR platforms) rather than presenting them as standalone pilots.
7. Pilot a responsible, fidelity-checked AI-assisted advocacy brief workflow. Drawing on the Sauki AI case study, evaluate whether a similarly constrained AI tool (trained to flag absence of explicit recommendations rather than infer them) could improve the speed and consistency of ACIOE’s stakeholder-specific advocacy brief production, with appropriate human validation built in.
8. Strengthen private-sector and civil-society awareness-building as an explicit advocacy product. Given the Summit’s finding that the private sector is largely unaware of the pending Digital Health Bill, ACIOE should consider producing a short, regularly updated policy-tracking brief for its network and partners on the status of key federal digital health policy instruments.
9. Build relationships with Summit-identified champions and convenors for future collaboration. Maintain contact with PHS Consult (convener), the Digital Connected Care Coalition (DCCC), and panel speakers from Advantage Health Africa, the Gates Foundation, and MTN Nigeria Foundation, all of whom are actively shaping the scale-up agenda ACIOE is advocating within.
10. Feed Summit learning into MSD for Mothers Project reporting and the ACIOE Foundation MHAC Project Phase 2 proposal. Where relevant, reference the NHTDAO’s establishment and the national policy direction confirmed at the Summit as supporting context for ongoing grant development and donor reporting.

10. Conclusion

The 6th Africa Digital Health Summit affirmed, at the highest levels of Nigerian and African public health leadership, the exact problem ACIOE Foundation’s digital health advocacy has been built to address: the persistent gap between promising pilots and sustained, government-absorbed, interoperable digital health systems. The Summit’s timing, coinciding with the announcement of the NHTDAO and ongoing progress on the National Digital Health Bill, presents a live and immediate opportunity for ACIOE to position its advocacy work, and the digital health innovations of its MSD for Mothers collaborators, within Nigeria’s evolving national digital health governance architecture.

I recommend that the Foundation treat this report’s recommendations as inputs to the next iteration of ACIOE’s digital health advocacy workplan, and that key contacts and institutional leads identified above be incorporated into ongoing stakeholder mapping.