Good morning, good afternoon, bonjour and thank you for joining this press conference on how COVID-19 is spurring and stimulating innovation in Africa, with more than 120 health innovations piloted or adopted on the continent just this year.
I am very pleased to be joined for this conversation by the Honourable Minister and Special Advisor to the President of Niger, Ibrahima Guimba Saidou, bonjour Monsieur le Ministre et bienvenue as well as Dr Ola Brown, the Founder of Flying Doctors Investment Company in Nigeria. Ola, it’s great to see you, and Dr Integrity Mchechesi, who is a Junior Resident Medical Doctor at Parirenyatwa Central Hospital in Zimbabwe. Welcome to all of you and thank you as always to our APO group friends for their support for this press conference.
COVID-19 is one of the most serious health challenges in a generation, but it is also an opportunity to drive forward innovation, ingenuity and entrepreneurship in life-saving health technologies.
In a new WHO study in August, we analysed 1000 health technologies developed worldwide in response to COVID-19 and found that Africa accounts for almost 13% of the innovations designed to enhance key areas like surveillance, contact tracing, community engagement, treatment, laboratory systems, and infection prevention and control and I think we constitute probably 14% of the world’s population.
Almost 58% of the innovations were driven by information technology, ranging from self-diagnosis tools in Angola to contact tracing applications or apps in Ghana, and almost half of Africa’s innovations were concentrated though in four countries: South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, and Rwanda. These home-grown innovations to fight COVID-19 are uniquely adapted to the African context.
The pandemic has put a fresh impetus on the need to invest in innovation and to put in place the strategic frameworks to support it. And here, we will be very happy to hear from the Minister from Niger. We know that investing in innovation yields tremendous dividends and that untapped talent and energy abounds in African countries. WHO has been working with countries to promote an innovation-friendly environment in the past three years.
In August, our Regional Committee for Africa (meaning the Ministers of Health annual meeting) endorsed a strategy to scale-up health innovations in Africa, recommending greater investment in high-quality health systems powered by continuous innovation to respond to changing population health needs.
The inaugural WHO Innovation Challenge in 2018 unearthed 2400 entries from entrepreneurs and innovators across the continent.
Building on this, WHO’s COVID-19 hackathon in March brought together 100 of the top innovators to propose solutions to emerging challenges in the response. This event led to several innovations being scaled-up as part of national response efforts, including M-Safari, an app that builds on Kenya’s M-PESA payment system, to facilitate contact tracing of passengers on public transport.
Globally, at WHO, we have set up the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool to share intellectual property and data and in the African Region, we have created a global database of innovations to share knowledge, ideas and successes.
As far as the situation is concerned, there are now more than 1.7 million cumulative cases of COVID-19 on the African continent and 41,000 people have died. We have seen a slowing down of the spread of the virus and a plateauing of cases in the past few weeks. As cases continue to plateau, integrating innovative approaches in the response will become increasingly important.
Finally, with elections coming up in at least eight African countries before the end of the year, and we have seen some of the reactions of the population in Guinea after the election results were announced, there are concerns about the risk of an uptick in cases as people come together during campaigns and voting. To prevent this, the public health capacities, need to be up to speed and people need to do their part to protect themselves and those around them by keeping a physical distance, wearing a mask and practicing frequent hand hygiene. This is what we all have to do in our various communities as well.
I look forward to our conversation today and thank you once again for having joined us.