What’s Next for Digital Square
By: Zahra Lutfeali, Interim Executive Director, Digital Square and edited by Alena Owen, Program Officer, Strategy & Advocacy, Digital Square
Since Digital Square launched in 2016, it has been a space for innovation, growth, and promotion of digital transformation across the health sector. Throughout the 7 years of our existence, we have prioritized learning from our communities to ensure that our work continues to be centered on the needs of the people it serves, representative of best-in-class thinking, inclusive of global standards, and reflective of the rapid change that happens across the digital ecosystem. To that end, in 2022 Digital Square adopted a slightly different approach to our annual strategy update. We began an exploratory process to better understand the initiative’s strengths, growth opportunities, and role within the digital health field. Specifically, we wanted to learn:
What were our most valuable frames of influence?
Where were we having an impact or able to generate greater impacts on health equity and access?
What could we do better or differently to increase adoption, adaptation, and use of open-source technologies to solve the largest health challenges?
Through this process, we solicited the perspectives and opinions of 77 Digital Square stakeholders and reviewed our work across our 80 staff and 30 countries of current implementation. Building on these conversations, we created an updated strategy that we believe reflects the current and evolving needs of the global digital health ecosystem and outlines how we plan to address those needs through our existing and new work.
New Strategy, Renewed Commitment to Digital Health Equity
The strategy reaffirms Digital Square’s existing vision and mission, updates our theory of change and metrics for measuring impact, and—perhaps most importantly—articulates what we believe our role is in the digital health sector. It also captures pivotal shifts in how we approach each area of our work: improving alignment and co-investment in digital health, strengthening the global goods ecosystem, and supporting countries’ digital transformation. Most notably, we will increasingly emphasize localization to ensure sustainable and scalable digital transformation in the countries where we operate. Equally important are a core set of principles which will underlie and drive Digital Square’s work going forward:
Ecosystem of Choice. We supply decision-makers with the information needed to make
informed choices about products, tools, capabilities, and services.Open Standards. We promote a commitment to open standards and open architecture.
Community and Country Sovereignty. We support local ownership and decision-making to facilitate long-term sustainability of digital transformation.
Agile and Iterative. We adapt our implementation approaches based on learning what works (or does not work) and we remain responsive to the changing ecosystem.
Inclusive and Transparent. We diversify our governance structures to redistribute decision-making power and create more inclusive, transparent processes.
These principles—and the country-centered approach to global development which they reflect—are part of what makes Digital Square unique. Digital Square is a marketplace where all voices in the digital sector are heard and where investment and innovation come together to accelerate health equity. Our strong relationships with donors and governments, when paired with our technical expertise, allow us to respond to the needs of countries and provide context-tailored solutions in the digital goods space.
The updated strategy allows us to lean into a few essential areas and I think Philippe Veltsos, Technical Director for PATH’s Center of Digital and Data Excellence, summarized the significance of the refresh process best:
“The strategy refresh is critical for Digital Square to be agile and to continuously improve, adjust, and refine our work and contributions in the context of the wider digital health ecosystem. It allows us to maximize our impact by listening to governments and ministries, donors, funders, and other public health stakeholders as well as our communities and networks at all levels.”
Looking Ahead: What's Next for Digital Square
True digital transformation will take time and will require deep commitments from all stakeholders, but most importantly from our government counterparts. Reflecting on the work she has been doing over the past 20 years in the digital health field, Digital Square’s Regional Director Fatou Fall said that, for her, the strategy centers her commitment to the “long view.” She sees our role “as guides—we give advice and provide technical assistance so that government leaders have the data to make informed decisions. Digital transformation should be supported by sufficient investment in governance as well as institutional and workforce capacity to enable the proper changes in digital systems and data use training, planning, and management. With this essential investment in people and processes, we align with national strategies that lay out a vision for the digitalization of the health sector.”
Digital Square’s strategy centers localization for precisely this reason. Our end-to-end service delivery model is one that requires constant iteration. As technology evolves and disease burdens change, we need to be agile and responsive to the changing demand, while still allowing for a roadmap to be created that highlights foundational requirements for enabling digital health transformation.
One of the tools we use in this end-to-end service delivery process is called Health Enterprise Architecture and was first introduced to PATH by Dykki Settle, one of the founders of Digital Square and the current Chief Digital Officer and Co-Director of the Center of Digital and Data Excellence at PATH. When asked what he is most excited about for Digital Square in 2023, Dykki said,
“Digital Square’s work to advance enterprise architecture across West Africa and beyond is most exciting to me. I know of no better approach to build cross-stakeholder alignment into a shared vision of digital transformation for health equity.”
As I look ahead to what is next for Digital Square, I could not be more excited about the opportunity we have to contribute to the growing digital health ecosystem. With this new strategy, we move even closer to a world where governments can access the information they need to enable choice at all levels, and where digital technology enables every person to access the health care they need, when they need it.