Improving Healthcare Access and Systems in Africa

Many African countries are experiencing an acute shortage of healthcare workers – a gap which has only grown since the COVID-19 pandemic. There is an urgent need to train more health workers to help improve the health, wellbeing and life expectancy of populations across Africa.

In partnership with GSK, Cognizant collaborated with Africa’s leading health charity, Amref Health Africa, to develop a platform to address the huge shortage of skilled healthcare workers, sustainably strengthen health systems and increase access to life-saving care.

For more than six decades, Amref Health Africa has been training healthcare workers in Sub-Saharan Africa with the help of various technologies. During the pandemic, the need for these technological tools became even more apparent. Amref had a particular need for a single, comprehensive platform that integrated its training technologies to better understand the end-to-end perspective of training.

To this end, Cognizant continues to collaborate with GSK as a strategic partner to improve the technological platforms used by African healthcare workers. Our shared objective is to collect data more effectively and to then use that data to make better decisions.

Cognizant's account teams, digital engineering teams, data analytics teams and program managers collaborate across time zones to develop a platform to integrate training needs and service delivery tools. We have introduced the integration layer and begun developing interfaces to visualize the integrated data. These insights assist Amref in predicting training requirements, training quality and making plans for future projects. Ultimately, this platform aids in making better decisions to address a variety of healthcare-related problems and community needs.