Consortium meeting in Cameroon

STRATEGIC is having it 3rts general meeting in Camaron from 08 – 10 April 2025. The opening ceremony were conducted by the vice-rector of the University of Yaoundé 1. He highlighted the need to adopt and use digital health technologies. Also, he stressed the need to embrace the innovation and creativity as way to advance knowledge. This innovation in DHTs is improve the minimize the burden on health infrastructure, including the limited number of health professionals, make health services closer to communities and increase the efficiency of data collection in research. Despite this advance there is concerns related to the privacy and data security, informed consent, safety, equity and accessibility, algorithmic bias and discrimination, accountability and liability, efficacy and ethical use of big data. STRATEGIC’s believes that this concerns can be addressed via strengthening existing ethics and regulatory capacities for socially acceptable design and deployment of digital health technologies in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA). Thus during our workshop the consortium team composed by University of Yaoundé (Cameron), Ghana Health Services (Ghana), University Eduardo Mondlane (Mozambique), LUMSA (Italy), University of Nottingham (UK), EUREC (Germany) discussed the finding about ethical issues in use of DHTs in Africa; co-creation workshops; development of training materials to ethics, regulators agency and researchers; and had a virtual discussion with Stakeholders Advise Board and all realized the complexity of this issue and the need to conducted co-creation workshops, round table with expertise to align the training material to the African context.