Nsengimana: Africa must build AI, unlock financing and scale health innovation

More than 5,900 delegates are expected in Kigali for the fifth Africa HealthTech Summit, taking place from September 30 to October 2 at the Kigali Convention Centre. Ahead of the summit, The New Times spoke to Jean-Philbert Nsengimana, its Chairman and Chief Curator, about AI in healthcare, financing digital health, scaling African innovation and continental collaboration. Excerpts: As you bring together people from across the health sector, what would you like to see come out of this year’s summit? From the beginning, the main outcome we have pursued is greater collaboration. Solving a challenge as big as health requires more than one sector or organisation, however large or well-resourced. It requires governments, the private sector, development partners, innovators and investors to work together. The Africa HealthTech Summit brings these actors into one place so conversations can translate into action. We should not only talk about working together; we should demonstrate results and impact. What tangible results have come out of the summit so far? Every year, we have promised to come back bigger, better and bolder. We started in a small room as a sideshow with about 600 people. The next year, we doubled, and then doubled again. This year, we are convening more than 5,000 people at the Kigali Convention Centre. There are also concrete examples. Last year, Diagnostics AI met the Steele Foundation for Hope at the summit. A few weeks later, the foundation invested $3.1 million and led a larger $6 million round in the company. The company is developing an innovative stethoscope that can help detect tuberculosis earlier, allowing patients to begin treatment sooner. Both sides will be back at the summit. Increasing investment into African startups is one of the impacts we want to drive. This year, we are also launching a health-tech deal room to capture activity on the summit floor and help more innovators access financing. How are you keeping people connected between annual summits and ensuring different groups have a seat at the table? We realised that one weekend in Kigali can generate great energy, but without a structure to sustain it, that momentum can disappear within weeks. That is why we launched the Africa Digital Health Networks, an umbrella platform bringing together communities across the continent. We have members from countries including Nigeria, Kenya and Ethiopia, and national chapters are beginning to emerge in more places. We also saw that women were underrepresented in the summit and in the wider conversation. We responded by creating African Women in Digital Health, which is growing rapidly. There is also a platform for young people. This year they will take part in a ministerial youth breakfast that brings them into direct conversation with ministers. Inclusion matters because important policy changes may not be measured in dollars, but can still strengthen health security. Why is the summit placing more emphasis on wellness and non-communicable diseases this year? For the first four editions, much of our attention was on how technology could address communicable diseases. The summit began as Africa emerged from Covid-19, when technology had shown its value in preparedness and response. This year, we felt it was important to broaden the conversation towards non-communicable diseases. That is what we mean by wellness: prevention, mental health, cardiovascular health, fitness, nutrition and women’s health. These areas received less attention, yet the health and economic burden of non-communicable diseases is becoming a major concern. You are also putting a strong focus on health intelligence. What is driving that conversation? We did not want to miss another major development taking shape across Africa. Rwanda launched its National Health Intelligence Centre in April, and since then more than 15 countries have been working on similar facilities. I was recently in Sierra Leone visiting one of them. Africa is increasingly recognising that better health outcomes require decisions informed by data and artificial intelligence. Countries are investing in those capabilities as they strengthen health security. Wellness and intelligence therefore go together, and we believe that is an important part of the future of healthcare. You have argued that Africa needs to embrace AI faster. Where is the continent falling behind? My biggest concern is that we are adopting AI more slowly than we should. We should be taking advantage of the opportunities it creates. When you look at our infrastructure, the innovation happening around AI models and how African data is being used to develop solutions that can respond to our needs, we are still moving too slowly. Before we even get to concerns about misuse, we should ask whether we are adopting AI fast enough. The United States and China are competing over leadership in the next technological revolution. Where is Africa in that conversation? In health tech specifically, I have found that Africans are often eager to adopt AI-based innovations. Nigeria, for example, has been identified as one of the markets most open to their use. How does Africa’s adoption of health technology compare with other parts of the world? The numbers show that we are still behind. After Covid-19, assessments of telemedicine adoption showed that use in many developed economies increased dramatically because lockdowns forced patients and providers to rely on remote care. In some of those markets, telemedicine grew about 40-fold. In Africa, growth was closer to threefold. Threefold growth is still significant, but Africa arguably needs these tools even more because technology can help us overcome geographic, affordability and access barriers. That was before the current AI wave. The opportunity is now even greater. What does Africa need to do to make the most of AI? We should not only use or consume AI; we should build. We need African AI-powered solutions, the infrastructure to support them and the human capacity required to develop and deploy them. I do not dismiss concerns around AI safety and security, but we should not allow those concerns to prevent us from building. We should use this moment to address some of Africa’s biggest healthcare challenges. What needs to change for African health-tech companies to scale beyond their home countries? The continent needs to come together. Africa is a market of about 1.4 billion people, but it is also highly fragmented. Each country is building its own systems and, in many cases, putting walls around its data in the name of sovereignty. China has a large integrated data environment. Europe is building a common health data space. The United States operates as one large market. Africa, by contrast, has dozens of separate health data spaces. The African Continental Free Trade Area was created to help defragment the market, but in practice we still have a long way to go. A company emerging from an innovation hub in Rwanda should be able to scale across Africa. The same should be true for a company based in Lagos, Dakar or Djibouti. Without greater integration, African innovators will struggle to compete globally. What policy changes would help health-tech innovations reach more people? We need greater alignment of policies and regulations so that Africa can move towards a more integrated digital health market. That would also make it easier to attract investment. We need to identify innovations that have already been proven to work and help them scale through financing, investment and access to government procurement. Public spending should also be used strategically to help proven health technologies reach communities and produce measurable impact. Where does Africa still need to do better on inclusion? Whenever we meet, we should ask who is still missing from the room. Last year, for example, we began paying more attention to people with disabilities because they were underrepresented. Women remain underrepresented as well. There is also a language and geographic gap. Among the top participating countries at the summit, only one Francophone country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, is strongly represented. We need to ask how Francophone Africa can be better included, and the same applies to Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking communities. How can African governments finance digital health without creating systems that depend heavily on donors? Digital health has depended on donor funding for a long time. That has contributed to what is sometimes called “pilotitis”: many promising projects are tested successfully but never reach scale. Africa has therefore become a graveyard for health-tech pilots. The way forward is to work more effectively with the private sector and make digital-health projects bankable. Think of it like taking plans for a house to a bank and showing that once the building is complete, it will generate enough income to repay the loan. That makes it easier to finance construction upfront. We want to apply a similar model to health technology. At the summit, we will launch the Presidential Health Innovation and Transformation Initiative, or PHITI. It is being shaped with countries that have expressed interest, including Zanzibar, Tanzania, Zambia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Ghana. The idea is to package digital-health investments into large, investable projects that can attract private capital. Money is already flowing through health systems. If those flows can be traced and structured properly, they can help countries attract financing to modernise health services. Are there countries already using this kind of approach? There are emerging examples. Rwanda recently moved to a fully paperless health system. Kenya has launched a National Digital Health Superhighway aimed at digitising services, payments and insurance premium collection. Kenya has used that model to bring information and financial flows together and support commercial financing for connectivity, devices, training, electronic medical records and other health-system infrastructure. The principle is that when people seek care, both information and financial activity are generated. If those flows are properly captured, they can become assets that support investment. Instead of taking 15 years to build digital infrastructure through scattered projects, countries could potentially mobilise financing and do it in a much shorter period. Kenya has also used a levy on healthcare transactions to support deployment and maintenance of digital infrastructure. We are encouraging countries to explore models that fit their own systems rather than continuing with many small, disconnected projects. What is your broader outlook for the future of health tech? The future of health technology will depend heavily on AI. AI is already transforming many sectors. In healthcare, the human doctor will remain essential, but medical professionals will increasingly need AI tools to keep up with the rapidly expanding body of medical information and deliver high-quality care. Mobile technology transformed access to financial services and helped advance financial inclusion across Africa. We now have an opportunity to use digital tools, including the mobile phone, to expand access to better healthcare. The technology exists. The challenge is whether we can build, finance and scale it together.

News

Nsengimana: Africa must build AI, unlock financing and scale health innovation