The Policy program is one of the five programs of the HealthTech Hub Africa (HTHA) with a central goal of
supporting the development of forward-looking policies to accelerate market entry, scalability, integration,
and sustainability of innovative healthtech solutions public health equity and access across Africa. This is achieved through three ways:
The policy program creates opportunities by connecting startups and policymakers to address gaps and facilitate the scaling and strengthening of innovations within African health systems.
Influence both in-country and global health policy by capturing real world insights and opportunities arising from identified policy and regulatory gaps in Africa.
Translate insights into actionable strategies to drive tangible improvements in population health across Africa.
By implementing this approach, the policy program is well positioned to strengthen partnerships between healthtech innovators and policy makers across Africa and to create a sustainable political will for healthtech innovations. This, in turn, strengthens the healthtech ecosystem, increases the use of data to inform policy dialogues at country and regional level, progressively creates an environment that supports healthtech startups and scaleups and ultimately encourages packaging and dissemination of homegrown healthtech innovation case studies and best practices.
Strengthened partnerships between HealthTech innovators and policymakers across Africa Sustained political will for HealthTech innovation across Africa to:
Intergovernmental Working Group (IWG)
The Intergovernmental Working Group (IWG) is an integral component of the Policy Program, aimed at creating sustained intergovernmental relations and political commitment both at country and regional level.
IWG Goal
The overall goal of the HTHA IWG is to create sustained intergovernmental relations, political commitment, and an enabling working environment between Africa healthtech innovators and country governments, aligned Africa regional bodies, and global platforms and partners to accelerate the realization of high-quality universal healthcare delivery in Africa.
Mobilize, position, and sustain effective Africa healthtech innovation ecosystem by cultivating sustained political will, reducing policy and political barriers, and increasing the prioritization of healthtech innovations among policymakers.
Amplify voices from healthtech innovators and foster partnerships with governments by guiding and supporting African healthtech innovators and governments to build stronger collaborations.
Sustain and diffuse shared experiences and best practices by guiding the development, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of the Policy Blueprint and sustainability strategies, with technical support from HTHA.
The second component of the policy program is the HTHA Healthtech Policy Blueprint, — a playbook developed through multi-country consultations, desk research, and stakeholder validation — that supports decision-makers by outlining overall policy directions, specific actions, and practical examples to accelerate healthtech in Africa and ensure the sustainable development, testing, and scaling of healthtech innovations.Â
The policy program in its goal of creating an enabling policy environment to facilitate the market entry, scale, integration, and sustainability of healthtech innovations within the public health sector, acknowledges persistent policy challenges identified by innovators across various African countries. These challenges include bureaucratic delays, regulatory ambiguity, infrastructure gaps, and funding unpredictability. Additionally, implementation gaps in existing policies such as unclear licensing processes, limited access to health data, data insecurity, limited integration of healthtech into health systems, and weak coordination across stakeholders also pose significant challenges.
To address these challenges, the policy program seeks to leverage opportunities such as value-driven collaboration between governments and ecosystem players, streamlined licensing frameworks, improved data governance, and stronger public-private partnerships.
The policy program collaborates closely with key players in the healthtech ecosystem- innovators, investors and policymakers to advance the Blueprint’s recommendations and realise an enabling environment for healthtech innovations.Â
Discover how healthtech can revolutionize healthcare for patients, providers, and communities in Africa. Our comprehensive report covers the potential of healthtech in achieving Universal Health Coverage, boosting efficiency with telemedicine, and addressing critical challenges like professional shortages and logistics.
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