Abstract
Around the world, mobile phones have been used for quite some years now to put healthcare systems into interactive action through various mobile health applications. The results regarding efficiency, access, greater social equality, and interconnectivity are proven, and they promise to mitigate economic and educational gaps. All this is increasingly the case in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where the technological prerequisites are quickly evolving.
About 500 million people in SSA—more than 46 percent of the region's population—were subscribing to mobile services in 2020, and their numbers are forecast to reach 615 million in 2025 (GSMA 2022). In the meantime, coverage works also in the structurally poorest areas. In 2020, 2G mobile network coverage in Burkina Faso was 81 percent for the territory and 92.4 percent for the population (ARCEP 2020).
The high penetration rate of mobile phones and the increasing coverage of the mobile network has created a vast variety of opportunities for health provision. Mobile devices can no longer be ignored in practical health delivery and disease prevention workflows. The positive potential of the application of digital health tools is obvious, and it is often said that mobile devices will be a key vehicle on the road to achieving universal health coverage in the Global South.
Despite this promise, the deployment of digital health tools in SSA faces many challenges, such as an urban-rural gap, a gender divide, low digital literacy, and a shortage of electricity and interconnectivity [End Page 134] (Holst et al. 2020). Poorly designed, unsustainable, unsafe, and irresponsible digital health products circulate that waste time, energy, and physical and financial resources. Digital health literacy increasingly correlates with digital inclusion—a situation where people can access and use information and communication technologies to take charge of and improve their health. Inversely, digital health technologies become useless when users do not have the skills, connectivity, mutual exchange, or understanding to use them, or do not have access when they need them.
Designing digital health solutions that fit with the digital literacy prerequisites and skills of low-qualified users matters crucially in SSA for sustainably sufficient coverage. The ability to find, understand, and use e-health resources is critical for consumers to be able to use current and future health services. Digital health literacy is therefore no longer an option but has become a fundamental requirement in SSA in the design of inclusive solutions.