WHO Academy trains digital health leaders to turn fragmented tools into national systems

In many low- and middle-income countries, national digital health teams are drowning in tools rather than solutions — multiple trackers for tuberculosis, HIV, vaccination, and malaria, each living in its own silo, as reported in an official statement published by the World Health Organization (WHO). To tackle that fragmentation, the WHO Academy, together with the International Organisation of la Francophonie (OIF), delivered a 12‑week Digital Health: Planning for National Systems course for French‑speaking countries across Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. The programme combined remote learning with live sessions and hands‑on national projects to help countries move from a chaos of applications to an integrated national strategy.

Sixty digital health leaders from Algeria, Benin, Cameroon, Comoros, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Gabon, Lebanon, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Congo, Rwanda, Togo, and Tunisia brought those realities into the room — often describing “one tracker for this disease, another for that programme” with no interoperability between them. Kossi Anani, a data scientist from Togo, put it bluntly: without structural coordination, countries risk “accumulating isolated and non‑interoperable tools.” Boualem Bendjedia, an ICT assistant in Algeria, said the course gave him “a strategic vision, useful tools and a structured approach” to align digital with national health priorities. Both responses reflect a shared truth: technology is only as good as the architecture and governance around it.

Over 12 weeks, participants combined 12 hours of self‑paced learning with 12 live sessions focused on peer exchange, group work, and country‑specific projects. The curriculum covered digital transformation foundations — health systems, strategy, enterprise architecture, governance, costing, procurement, digital financial services, and future trends. The emphasis was on making complex concepts immediately usable rather than purely theoretical.

The results were visible in how quickly participants began applying what they learned. In Togo, Kossi Anani helped redirect a promising data visualization project once he spotted that the underlying reporting system had not been defined — catching a structural flaw before it was locked in. In Algeria, Boualem Bendjedia said the final project fundamentally reshaped how he now approaches digital initiatives: not as isolated tools, but as part of a broader strategic and governance framework.

The course is part of a larger push by the WHO Academy and WHO’s Digital Health, Analytics and AI Department to ensure learning is accessible, context‑specific, and oriented toward system‑wide change. The idea is simple: if digital expansion is outpacing integration, the best way to close that gap is not more technology, but more strategic capacity.