2023 Digital Square Strategy Refresh: Call for Review
Digital Square revises our strategy annually to be transparent and responsive to the needs of the global digital health community. For the 2023 Strategy Refresh, we consulted with 73 global stakeholders and learned the following.
Local ownership is critical and new partnerships and capacity strengthening may be necessary to support local ownership and long-term sustainability.
Building a diverse ecosystem of choice would support the localization of digital health solutions.
Recentering Digital Square’s technical expertise to advise on software, content, and services would further promote a global commitment to open standards and open architecture as country decision-makers utilize our advice to make informed choices.
These data have guided changes to our 2023 Strategy Refresh that hinge on increased localization across all three of Digital Square’s Result Areas.
R1: Alignment and Co-investment
Advocate with donors and partners to position country needs and priorities first and facilitate improved processes and systems to support country-driven investments.
Use market analyses and benchmarking tools to guide how countries can plan for scale.
R2: Global Goods Ecosystem
Expand the global good maturity model to include one for each type of global good: software, content, and services.
Through R3 Regional Hubs, create regional global good guidebooks.
Increase effort on global goods implementing global architectural patterns and designs into tools and solution offerings.
Work with the global good community to advocate for use and adoption of infrastructure qualification, operational qualification, and performance qualification principles.
R3: Country Digital Transformation
Focus on a smaller set of countries to gather lessons learned and demonstrate sustainability models that enable a country’s digital transformation during Digital Square’s project lifecycle.
Creating Regional Digital Square Hubs to allow for smaller scale developments of the Digital Square “market” allowing local experts to bundle and adapt tools based on local context; more rapidly move to implementation; contextualize the global good guidebook and implement standards; and adapt toolkits and trainings to local languages and contexts.
Offer more locally relevant and sustainable solutions by creating and supporting a roster of local entrepreneurs, innovators, and implementers of global goods.
We invite you to provide your feedback and pose any questions to us on these shifts in this version of the 2023 Digital Square Strategy by 15 December 2022. You will be asked to think specifically about the questions posed below, but you are also free to add anything beyond these questions:
What criteria will be critical as Digital Square evaluates opportunities for deeper country engagement?
Have we prioritized the right learning questions or are there other learning questions you think we should prioritize in 2023? Learning questions include:
What is the impact of digital health?
How is Digital Square and its ecosystem of partners supporting localization, country sovereignty, and an ecosystem of choice? What approaches work and which do not?
What is the vision for a sustainable digital health ecosystem and how does our community get there?
For each learning question, what resources/perspectives do you have to help us learn?
What do you like best about our Key Performance Indicators and evolved measurement plan, and what should we keep?
What are one to two ways we could strengthen our KPIs and measurement plan?
Should Digital Square invest in coordinating and aligning around a common taxonomy and set of KPIs for talking about the scale of global goods? If yes, which other learning question would you deprioritize to resource this?
What recent evidence could you share that supports investment in digital health?
After your ideas, questions, thoughts, and comments are reviewed and considered, we will bring a final version of the 2023 Strategy Refresh to our Board of Directors and the final will be posted in early 2023.
Thank you for your invaluable time and input.
Update: As of December 16, 2022, the comment period and feedback form are now closed.