Governments, development partners, funders, innovators and healthcare organisations have made 10 major commitments aimed at accelerating digital health transformation across Africa.
The commitments were announced at the Insights Learning Forum (ILF) 2026, held in Abuja recently, where more than 400 delegates gathered to deliberate on digital health and healthcare transformation across the continent.
The forum, hosted by eHealth Africa and the Dala Africa Group, was held under the theme, “Insights. Partnerships. Inclusion. Interoperability. Investment.”
The commitments, unveiled during the closing Commitment Session, focused on expanding financing for scalable health innovations, strengthening primary healthcare and advancing maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health.
Other areas include supporting women-led entrepreneurship, widening access to quality healthcare, promoting ethical health data sharing and developing interoperable digital health systems.
Participants also pledged to strengthen Africa’s innovation ecosystem through locally led partnerships, increased support for entrepreneurs and young innovators, improved knowledge sharing and efforts to reduce fragmentation in digital health initiatives.
Speaking at the forum, the Coordinating Minister of Health, represented by the Director-General of the National Institute for Pharmaceutical Research and Development (NIPRD), Dr Obi Adigwe, said stronger collaboration remained critical to improving Nigeria’s health system.
He said: “Our focus now is to build on this momentum by fostering stronger partnerships, accelerating innovation and creating an ecosystem where digital health solutions can thrive and deliver lasting impact.”
Similarly, the Minister of State for Health and Social Welfare, Dr Iziaq Adekunle Salako, reaffirmed the Federal Government’s commitment to developing resilient and digitally enabled health systems.
Salako stressed the need for the country to move beyond pilot projects to scalable systems, fragmented interventions to integrated solutions, and intentions to measurable impact.
“Innovation is the engine of transformation, and digital health is its nervous system,” he said.
Also speaking, the National Coordinator, Sector-Wide Approach (SWAp) Coordination Office, Dr Muntaqa Umar-Sadiq, said sustainable health system transformation could not be achieved through isolated projects.
He said strong institutions were needed to coordinate investments, align partners and ensure accountability.
“The future of healthcare depends on our ability to move from fragmented interventions to coordinated action,” Umar-Sadiq said.
The Executive Director of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA), Muyi Aina, said strengthening health systems required more than financial investment, noting that partnerships, innovation and the effective use of technology were equally important.
Aina said collaboration among government, the private sector, development partners and communities, supported by data-driven decision-making, could help build more responsive and inclusive health systems.
The Executive Director of eHealth Africa, Atef Fawaz, said the Insights Learning Forum was established to provide a platform for governments, development partners, innovators, researchers and implementers to work together on health system transformation.
“We want Africa to think and act as one. We need to look beyond geographical boundaries and work together to solve common challenges,” Fawaz said.
He added that the forum would not merely serve as a platform for making pledges, but would track the implementation of the commitments through annual progress reviews.
The Chairman of the Africa HealthTech Summit and Chair of the Africa Digital Health Network, Jean Philbert Nsengimana, called for stronger continental integration to unlock the potential of Africa’s digital health ecosystem.
Nsengimana identified donor dependency, fragmentation and inadequate pathways for integrating innovations into public health delivery platforms as some of the challenges requiring urgent attention.
He also called for infrastructure that would enable African startups and founders to scale their innovations more rapidly.
For her part, the Director of Partnerships and Programmes at eHealth Africa, Ota Akhigbe, said the forum was deliberately designed to translate discussions into coordinated action.
“Partnerships are central to everything we do at eHealth Africa, and they are equally central to the vision of the Insights Learning Forum,” she said.
Akhigbe said the Commitment Session was focused on quality rather than the number of pledges, adding that participating organisations were encouraged to make meaningful commitments capable of advancing digital health transformation.
The organisers said progress on the commitments would be reviewed at future editions of the forum as part of efforts to strengthen accountability and ensure that discussions translate into measurable outcomes.
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