Pan-African mHealth Initiative: Addressing 4 key barriers in mHealth

There are more than 900 mHealth products and services currently being tracked across almost 30 research indicators in the GSMA mHealth tracker. Only a few currently demonstrate scale, replication or significant impact on the health system.

In order to unlock the latent potential of mHealth, the GSMA has identified four key barriers that need to be addressed:

  1. fragmentation of service delivery;
  2. lack of scale across the full reach of mobile networks;
  3. limited replication; and
  4. misalignment of the value proposition between mobile and health stakeholders with an inability to create long term sustainability of services

Pan-African mHealth Initiative

To address these barriers, the GSMA is bringing together its mobile industry members, health stakeholders and governments to collaborate in priority markets to enable scaled integration of mobile and ICT into health systems that provide socio-economic benefit to consumers, empower health care workers and enable health care systems.

Objectives of the Pan-African mHealth Initiative

  1. Demonstrate the business case for investment
  2. Support implementation of services
  3. Fast track the integration of mobile into health

Landscaping of mHealth services

The GSMA mHealth team recently concluded a research of mHealth services in South Africa. Similar to other markets we once again confirmed 4 key barriers. With the support of international donors, the GSMA started developing a business model that will demonstrate long term investment into mHealth and broker partnership opportunities for mobile and health stakeholders to collaborate through developing a per country, interoperable, sustainable implementation plan for mHealth services.

mHealth services in Nigeria and Malawi: We need your input!

Going forward, we are conducting a research in Malawi and Nigeria to obtain in-depth understanding of mHealth’s commercial and technical landscape, the gaps, challenges and opportunities; and mHealth stakeholders in these countries. An important part of this research is updating and verifying existing entries in the mHealth Tracker to provide a better overview of the current state of mHealth services in Nigeria and Malawi.

With this in mind, we would like to kindly ask you to have a look at the mHealth Tracker and let us know if any updates are required. If you are not yet included in the mHealth Tracker, please let us know so we can add you and ensure you are included as part of our Country Feasibility Report.

Please complete the form or send updates and additions to [email protected]. Thank you for your help!

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