SENEGAL – After the first edition of the health tech hub summit in Kigali, Rwanda, earlier this year, the second edition is set to happen at the Radisson Blu hotel in Dakar, Senegal on Tuesday, 29 August.
Dakar is in full gear to host the consequential follow-up summit on health technologies and innovation in the realm of public health across Africa.
The forthcoming summit is expected to convene a cadre of esteemed government officials hailing from various African nations, alongside enterprising start-ups and discerning investors.
The“Dakar Health Tech Hub Summit,” will be held under the overarching theme of “Fast-tracking Innovations in the Field of Public Health in Africa.”
Expandingly, this is a collaborative endeavor, the Dakar summit is jointly organized by the Ministry of Health and Social Action of Senegal, the Novartis Foundation, and HealthTech Hub Africa, a pioneering health technology accelerator headquartered in Kigali.
This forthcoming summit is an extension of the dialogue initiated during the initial summit in Kigali, which transpired in March of this year.
That inaugural meeting bore fruit in the form of an Intergovernmental Working Group (IWG), designed to facilitate multinational discourse between public health administrators and innovators.
The IWG’s overarching objective is to identify policy resolutions that can expedite the integration of technological innovations within public health frameworks across the African continent.
Presently, these young individuals constitute a staggering 60% of the continent’s unemployed population. In this context, technology has emerged as a pivotal instrument for bridging these yawning gaps in healthcare and employment.
The Dakar Health Tech Hub Summit will convene an array of regulators, policymakers, and innovators with the aim of scrutinizing and ratifying insights derived from the deployment of technological solutions within the public health systems of African nations.
The event is poised to showcase the tangible fruits of digital health and e-health solutions that have been implemented by Senegal’s Ministry of Health and other similar initiatives across Africa.
Notably, discussions will gravitate around the sustainability and widespread adoption of effective technological interventions for bolstering public health standards across the continent.
Fast-tracking HealthTech Innovations to Improve Public Health in Africa
The African continent is beset with formidable health-related challenges and despite shouldering 22% of the global disease burden, Africa lays claim to a mere 3% of the world’s healthcare workforce and less than 1% of the planet’s financial resources earmarked for health initiatives.
Moreover, projections indicate that by 2030, Africa will have approximately 374 million working-age youth.
Technology has proved to be the most powerful tool to close those health and employment gaps.
The HealthTech Hub Africa is a health tech accelerator with a physical co-working and community space in Kigali, Rwanda.
The program aims to drive the development of health technologies in Africa and fast-track innovation in public health systems through collaboration with government partners.
They are provided with a thoughtfully designed program that allows startups to create a great impact.
Startups in this stage are post-revenue African registered companies with an African founder operating in one of the HealthTech Hub’s four thematic areas.
The startups are expected to impact at least 5,000 to 50,000 beneficiaries directly and as part of the cohort, startups can refine their business models, enhance investment readiness, validate their solutions, and integrate them into the public health sector.
These will be post-revenue startups registered in an African country operating in one of the program sectors and led by an African founder and will be expected to have directly impacted more than 50,000 beneficiaries to date.
The goal will be to select ten startups in this stage, primarily from the focus countries, and support them to validate and embed at scale their solutions in one or more public health systems in Africa.
The first year of the HealthTech Hub Africa, inaugurated in December 2021, supported phase one for establishing the Blueprint for a public-private mechanism to fast-track health tech Innovations for public health in Africa.
“The summit is an opportunity to define new solutions for the most pressing health and care challenges, and convene the multisector organizations needed to implement these solutions at a scale that can transform the health of entire populations,” said Dr. Ann Aerts, Head of the Novartis Foundation.
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