Beyond COVID-19: scaling up and sustaining mobile health in Africa
Authors: Yap Boum
Journal: The Lancet (2021)

In their Perspective,1Sawadogo NH Sanou H Greene JA Duclos V Promises and perils of mobile health in Burkina Faso.Lancet. 2021; 398: 738-739Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (8) Google Scholar N Hélène Sawadogo and colleagues highlight the challenges of mobile health care in Africa with the MOS@N project, which provided medical support to pregnant women but ran out of funding 3 years into operation. Securing longer-term funding to sustain mobile health is a challenge in Africa.2Wamala DS Augustine K A meta-analysis of telemedicine success in Africa.J Pathol Inform. 2013; 4: 6Crossref PubMed Google Scholar Social innovations such as BIMA (Ghana), AccesAfya (Kenya), Idocta (Cameroon), and Healthforce (South Africa) use telemedicine to improve access to quality health care but have not managed to scale up. Most Africans live under the poverty line and cannot afford to pay for health care. Thus, it is critical to remove financial barriers to ensure that telemedicine reaches all people. There are a number of innovative financing mechanisms that should be tried to scale up telemedicine.3Oroxom R Glassman A McDonald L Structuring and funding development impact bonds for health: nine lessons from Cameroon and beyond.https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/structuring-funding-development-impact-bonds-for-health-nine-lessons.pdfDate: Jan 26, 2018Date accessed: June 30, 2021Google Scholar These mechanisms include health-care impact bonds that have leveraged US$25 million to tackle malaria in Mozambique4SDG Partnership PlatformIntellecapInnovative health financing models for universal health coverage in Kenya.https://www.intellecap.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Innovative-Financing-Models-for-achieving-Universal-Health-coverage-in-Kenya_20th-Feb-2019_Final_Print.pdfDate: Feb 20, 2019Date accessed: June 30, 2021Google Scholar and $2 million in Cameroon to provide 18 000 cataract surgeries over a 5-year period.3Oroxom R Glassman A McDonald L Structuring and funding development impact bonds for health: nine lessons from Cameroon and beyond.https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/structuring-funding-development-impact-bonds-for-health-nine-lessons.pdfDate: Jan 26, 2018Date accessed: June 30, 2021Google Scholar Patton and Joseph, in their New (not-so-Oxford) Dictionary of Innovative Finance, suggest another alternative is the use of diaspora bonds, which allow Africans living outside of their home countries to invest in local projects. Similarly, they suggest charity bonds are opportunities to provide start-up funding by financing medium-term debt to support project implementation. Scaling up telehealth requires strong political will to drive innovation by partnering with the private sector and the diaspora to facilitate increased sustainable funding opportunities in African countries to ensure greater health-care access equity. I declare no competing interests. Promises and perils of mobile health in Burkina FasoMobile health (mHealth) has attracted much attention in the global health community as a technological fix that can short-circuit inadequate health-system infrastructure and build access. But like many other technology-based approaches to remedy structural health inequities, mHealth interventions can be overhyped. We discusses here MOS@N, an mHealth network launched in 2013 by the Centre de Recherche en Santé de Nouna (CRSN), Burkina Faso, with funding from the International Development Research Centre, Canada. Full-Text PDF Beyond COVID-19: scaling up and sustaining mobile health in Africa – Authors' replyWe thank Yap Boum for taking the time to respond to our Perspective.1 Full-Text PDF