ArticleJournal of healthcare leadership2026
State of Digital Health in 32 Countries of the WHO African Region: A Multi-Country Maturity Assessment with Short-Term Longitudinal Comparisons Across Leadership, Policy, and Health Systems Domains (2023 - 2025).
Article in Journal of healthcare leadership, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Background: Evidence on digital health maturity in Africa remains limited. We characterized maturity across countries in the World Health Organization African Region between 2023 and 2025 to generate a regional baseline for policies and investments. Methods: We analyzed the Global Digital Health Monitor data, which scored seven domains of the digital health enabling environment on a 5-phase scale. All assessments from the 2023, 2024, and 2025 cycles were extracted in April 2026, yielding 50 country-year observations from 32 of the 47 member states of the World African Region, with 17 of these 32 countries reassessed in at least one subsequent cycle. Assessment coverage declined over time (29, 17, and four countries in 2023, 2024, and 2025, respectively); therefore, the 2025 comparison rests on a small subset. The data are self-reported by the country focal points and published only after government approval. We used descriptive statistics (means with medians and interquartile ranges for the ordinal phase scale), choropleth mapping, short-term descriptive change analysis, Spearman correlation (reported with sample size and Results: We analyzed 32 countries and 50 country-year observations. Most countries were in Phase 3 (established; 21 of 32, 66%), with none in phases 1 or 5; 5 were at Phase 4, and 6 were at Phase 2. Leadership and governance were consistently the strongest (mean phase 3.00 in 2023 and 3.75 in 2025), and the workforce was the weakest. Of the 17 reassessed countries, three improved and none declined; one country (Kenya) advanced two phases in one year. Standards and interoperability were strongly correlated with services and applications (Spearman Conclusion: Among the assessed countries in the World Health Organization African Region, digital health rests on established governance but is constrained by a weak workforce and uneven interoperability. Targeted investment in the workforce, shared data architectures, and broader maturity monitoring are the most consequential levers for progress in this field. The findings should not be extrapolated to non-assessed Member States or to the wider African continent, which extends beyond the World Health Organization's African Region.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.