COVID-19 spurred over 120 health innovations in Africa – WHO

The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred the development of more than 120 health technology innovations that have been piloted or adopted in Africa, a new World Health Organization (WHO) analysis finds.

According to the analysis released Thursday, the countries with the most innovations in Africa were South Africa (13 percent), Kenya (10 percent), Nigeria (8 percent) and Rwanda (6 percent).

Africa accounts for 12.8 percent of 1,000 new or modifications of existing technologies that have been developed worldwide to target different areas of the COVID-19. The response areas include surveillance, contact tracing, community engagement, treatment, laboratory systems and infection, prevention and control.

In Africa, 57.8 percent of the technologies were ICT-driven, 25 percent were based on 3D printing and 10.9 percent were robotics. The ICT-based innovations include WhatsApp Chatbots in South Africa, self-diagnostic tools in Angola, contact tracing apps in Ghana and mobile health information tools in Nigeria.

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“COVID-19 is one of the most serious health challenges in a generation, but it is also an opportunity to drive forward innovation, ingenuity and entrepreneurship in life-saving health technologies,” said Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa.

“It’s great to see the youthful energy of the continent fired up to fight COVID-19. Solar-powered automatic handwashing tools, mobile applications that build on Africa’s rapidly growing connectivity. These home-grown innovations are uniquely adapted to the African context”, Moeti said.

Moeti, quoting a study by the World Bank group said the African countries, at around 0.01 percent per capita, invest far less in innovation than developed countries and the continent is not living up to its potential. She noted that investment is vital to further spark innovation on the continent

“The pandemic has put a fresh impetus on the need to invest in innovation and to put the right policies and strategic frameworks in place to unleash African ingenuity on the world,” Moeti said.

“We know that investing in innovation yields huge dividends. With COVID-19 and other health threats part of our daily life, there’s no time to waste in creating the right environment for African innovators to flourish”, she added.

WHO recommends greater investment in ICT infrastructure, robotics, artificial intelligence, drones and mechatronics as well as putting the right policies in place to boost creativity and entrepreneurship and to bolster university-led research.

Earlier this year, all 47 African Member-States in the WHO African Region adopted a WHO strategy for scaling up health innovations in Africa.

By 2023, 80 percent of all Member States agreed to perform needs assessments to identify critical gaps in their health systems and will have established coordination mechanisms to scale up innovations, 75 percent will have developed policies and incentive frameworks, and half will have developed analytical tools to assess the economic and social impact of innovations.