Why digital literacy is key to climate-health in Africa

“While internet penetration in Africa has grown, digital literacy is also needed to advance digital health. It’s as essential as knowing how to take a temperature or administer an injection,” said Sean Blaschke, the Chief of Digital Health at UNICEF. 

Other challenges discussed include weak data protection, fragmented regulation, slow product approvals, limited local datasets and biased AI benchmarks which hinder scale and trust.

Mr Blaschke, the Chief of Digital Health at UNICEF, explained that technology investments alone are not enough. “If you link that technology investment to capacity building on digital literacy and  institutional strengthening, your chances of success jump from 23% to 85%,” he said. “Without that, we keep reinventing pilots that never scale.”

He illustrated the power of solid digital foundations through UNICEF’s work in micro-planning. Using satellite data and AI, his team helped several countries identify large gaps in national counts. “In one exercise, we found 1.1 million children under the age of one who were unknown, 440,000 of them had never received a single vaccine,” he said. For him, this kind of visibility is the first step to effective digital health.

Other speakers at the Expo, including Dr Fred Mutisya, Health Tech Lead at Qhala and ICT Chair of the Kenya Medical Association, unpacked why the continent continues to struggle with digital-health adoption despite growing investment. Many health workers, Dr Mutisya noted, still lack the confidence and skills to use new tools effectively. “If you can’t explain it to your grandmother, then it’s too complicated,” he said, urging developers to build systems that are simple and backed by practical training.

Data protection and privacy is also a pressing issue. Delegates warned that health apps and connected devices are collecting unprecedented volumes of personal data in countries where legal safeguards are still catching up. In their opinion, digital health is capturing more data than our laws can handle. This highlights fears that breaches or misuse could undermine public trust.

Dr Mutisya pointed to the regulatory vacuum surrounding digital-health innovations and AI tools. “Regulators don’t trust models that make claims they can’t verify,” he said. His team has developed a new method to test AI systems using existing national clinical-practice guidelines. “If you already have your guidelines, you can plug them in and on the other end, you get questions and answers that regulators can use to test these models.” This home-grown pipeline, he added, helps create locally relevant benchmarks instead of relying on foreign medical-exam datasets.

That feeds into a deeper problem of representation and bias. “If our models are trained on pneumonia and not malaria, they fail our patients,” Dr Mutisya said. Most global medical-AI benchmarks are built on data from high-income countries, leaving out the diseases that matter most to African populations. His group is working to close that gap through open, African-led datasets, including a thousand-image mammography database now being used for AI validation across the region.

Beyond literacy and regulation, speakers stressed that connectivity and infrastructure remain fundamental barriers. Mr Blaschke described connectivity as “a super determinant” of health, saying that reliable broadband, electricity and affordable devices should be seen as health investments.

Climate change disrupts healthcare access in rural and underserved areas of Africa. Extreme weather events can also damage healthcare infrastructure. Additionally, climate-induced diseases further strain healthcare systems.

Digital health provides a vital solution by enabling remote consultations and reducing the need for travel to hospitals. This enables access to care and lower healthcare-related carbon emissions.