Africa’s health systems are generating vast amounts of data, but fragmented digital platforms are preventing governments from turning that information into better healthcare decisions, Sand Technologies founder and CEO Fred Swaniker has said.
In an exclusive interview with Taarifa on the sidelines of the Africa Health Tech Summit in Kigali, Swaniker said fragmentation remains one of the biggest challenges facing Africa’s rapidly expanding digital health ecosystem.
He said many African countries have invested in digital health through separate pilots and systems that often operate in isolation, creating large volumes of data that cannot easily communicate with one another.
“The single biggest problem we see in Africa’s health data ecosystem is fragmentation,” Swaniker said.
According to him, health data collected at community level may not be connected to information held by health centres, hospitals or national referral facilities. This means patients can repeatedly provide the same medical history or undergo procedures because clinicians cannot access information generated during previous visits.
Swaniker said such gaps can have financial and, in some cases, potentially life-threatening consequences.
A patient arriving at a hospital in an emergency, for example, may have allergies, previous diagnoses, medication history or test results that are unavailable to the treating medical team.
The result, he said, can include duplicated tests, longer waiting times and unnecessary expenditure across the health system.
“If you’ve done an MRI before, and now you are doing an MRI again because I don’t have the data from your previous MRI, it does happen,” he said.
But Swaniker argues that the problem extends beyond individual patients.
For governments, disconnected health information makes it harder to obtain a complete picture of how the health system is performing and where resources are most needed.
Governments may struggle to determine whether health budgets are being allocated effectively, where medical personnel should be deployed, where new facilities are required and how medicines and other supplies should be distributed.
Swaniker gave malaria control as an example, saying governments need reliable, real-time information to determine where interventions such as mosquito nets should be directed rather than relying solely on historical patterns.
He also pointed to medicine wastage as another consequence of poor data integration, where supplies can expire in one area while patients elsewhere face shortages of the same medicines.
Building a national health intelligence system
Swaniker said Sand Technologies is seeking to address the problem by integrating data from different parts of health systems into what he described as an “intelligent system” for ministries of health.
The company is currently working with about 12 African countries, with plans to expand to 18 countries by the middle of 2027, according to Swaniker.
In Rwanda, Sand Technologies supported the Ministry of Health in establishing the National Health Intelligence Centre, an approach the company is seeking to replicate in other countries.
“We need to be able to connect all of this fragmented data into a holistic, living representation of the healthcare system,” Swaniker said.
He argued that Africa needs to move beyond isolated digital health solutions and begin treating health data as part of a connected national system.
“We are thinking today in point solutions and we need to start thinking more systemically,” he said.
For Swaniker, the urgency is therefore not simply about collecting more health data.
It is about ensuring that information already being generated across Africa’s health systems can be connected, interpreted and used to guide decisions.
As African countries expand digital health infrastructure, the ability to integrate that information could increasingly determine whether governments can translate their investments in technology into measurable improvements in healthcare delivery.
