Bridging the Gap:Scaling HealthTech from Pilot to System-Level Impact

An eHealth Africa Executive Roundtable

Purpose

This 90-minute executive roundtable convened leaders across government, financing, technology, academia, and implementation to move past why pilots fail and focus on the harder, more valuable question – what does it actually take for innovation to become part of a working health system, through government adoption, procurement, financing that outlives the grant, interoperability, and delivery capacity? The session was deliberately designed to end not in conversation, but in commitments.

The headline

The room reached a clear, shared conclusion that Africa does not have an innovation problem. It has the founders, the talent, the ideas, the technical capability, and communities already solving their own problems. The real challenge is the transition from innovation to institutionalisation – and that transition is an act of orchestration, not of technology, funding, or policy alone. A pilot only becomes meaningful when it can survive inside a real health system, with government alignment, sustainable financing, procurement pathways, interoperability, workforce readiness, implementation capacity, trust, and local ownership.

Framing perspectives

Jean-Philbert Nsengimana (Chairman, Africa HealthTech Summit) reframed the African founder not merely as a company-builder but as the scaling infrastructure itself – boundary-spanner, translator, network orchestrator, and political navigator, holding together worlds that rarely speak to one another. His provocation was that our ecosystems must learn to recognise and support these roles, and sometimes the most powerful enabling act is simply to stop putting roadblocks in founders’ way.

Atef Fawaz (Executive Director, eHealth Africa) grounded the conversation in implementation reality – pilots fail when they are designed far from the people they are meant to serve. The pilots that endure; several of eHA’s now run five-plus years and are paid for directly by the government, are those built with the community from the bottom up, that solve the problem the community actually cares about, and that honour culture, which on this continent is everything.