Turning health crisis into an engine of growth

The sharp decline in health aid may be a blessing in disguise. It is forcing governments to think of health as an economic factor and shift priorities. With more private sector investment in new technologies, the health sector could well also become a major economic driver.

The meeting of Africa’s finance and health leaders in Tangier, Morocco, in April 2026 for the Economic Commission for Africa’s High-Level Forum on Sustainable Health Financing couldn’t have come at a better time – the health sector globally, and in Africa in particular, is facing a crisis moment.

Despite accounting for a quarter of the global disease burden, Africa’s share of global health expenditure is less than 2%. On top of this comes the almost 50% decline in development assistance for health in Africa, from approximately $25.8bn in 2021 to approximately $13bn by 2025.

Unlike during times of plenty, when health ministries were well-funded, often with parallel financing outside national budgets, they now desperately need the finance ministries to unlock funding to sustain gains made over the last decade.

It is time to move from health as an externally driven and financed expenditure to a truly domestic investment for macroeconomic stabilisation and growth.

The continent has always paid dearly for underinvesting in health. The WHO estimates ill-health, disability and premature death cost the region more than $2.4trn a year in lost output. Healthcare costs are also a major driver of poverty: governments fund less than 41% of health spending on average, and out-of-pocket costs push over 150m Africans into poverty every year.

From HIV over the last three decades to Covid-19 to Ebola – every health crisis is an economic shock that sets Africa back. The AfDB estimates that Covid-19 resulted in cumulative GDP losses of between $173bn and $237bn in 2020–21.

The pandemic pushed millions into poverty, disrupted education and employment and left countries with higher debt and less fiscal space to invest in development.

But there is a silver lining that gives cause for optimism.  Despite (or perhaps due to) a rapid decline of development aid for health, there is a serious rethink, willingness and ‘freedom’ to invest in priorities that are relevant for the countries rather than those dictated by the donors.

Several common threads are emerging that focus on making the broader health systems fit for purpose to leverage the potential of emerging technologies – a combination of energy, connectivity, artificial intelligence, point-of-care diagnostics, data, advanced therapeutics, local production and health entrepreneurship that can fundamentally help Africa leapfrog and change how healthcare is delivered.

Power equals life

The WHO estimates that 15% of health facilities in sub-Saharan Africa have no electricity at all, while only around 40% have reliable electricity. Only about half of hospitals have reliable power.

For healthcare, electricity is not an optional upgrade – it is core health infrastructure and a life-saving investment. Studies have shown this. In Uganda, women giving birth without electricity were 39 times more likely to die than those in powered facilities. In Ghana, every day with more than two hours of outages meant a 43% jump in mortality. With solar costs falling significantly, making energy for health infrastructure nationally affordable, this is an investment that Africa can ill afford to neglect.

Connectivity can overcome geography

For too long, Africa’s geography has determined who gets healthcare and the quality of service received. More than 95% of people in African cities live within 30 minutes of a health facility, compared with only 65% in villages and dispersed rural areas – and 10–15% of rural populations live more than three hours from a health post.

Distance translates into poorer health and higher mortality: in rural Ethiopia, for example, children living more than 1.5 hours from a health centre had two to three times the risk of death.

But geography no longer has to determine access. Satellite connectivity, telemedicine, remote diagnostics and AI can bring specialist expertise, clinical decision support and continuous care to the most remote health facility – turning distance from a barrier into a solvable technology challenge. It helps to change the paradigm from ‘bring the patient to the hospital’ to ‘bring the hospital to the patient’.

For example, Proximie, a technology company solving the challenge of access to surgery (over 5bn people globally don’t have access to surgical care), dramatically improves surgical capacities and outcomes by connecting operating rooms and clinicians in remote areas with those in urban centres, devices and data. It has shown how such digital collaboration can drastically reduce maternal and infant mortality, for example in Kenya.

Frontline AI first

Doctor and specialist shortages have shaped African healthcare for decades, but AI is starting to change that math. Africa accounts for over 70% of global maternal deaths, many preventable with something as simple as a timely ultrasound flagging high-risk pregnancies before they turn into emergencies.

Healium Sono’s AI-guided handheld ultrasound lets frontline workers scan patients with real-time AI assistance and remote expert interpretation. Qure.ai does something similar for TB, with AI-assisted chest X-ray analysis deployed across 100-plus countries, including screening in high-risk South African communities. The significance is not simply that a handheld machine can perform an ultrasound. It is that expertise can increasingly travel digitally, while the patient stays in her community. This is particularly important for maternal and newborn health, where delay can mean the difference between the life and death of the mother and child.

The UK’s Stablepharma is trialling a thermostable version of an existing tetanus-diphtheria vaccine that would be the world’s first ‘fridge-free’ vaccine. The implications for Africa, especially if the technology can be extended to other vaccines, are enormous.

The data fix

While AI in health can be transformative, it does not mean much without solid data to back it up – the goal isn’t just digitising records; it’s turning health systems from reactive to predictive.

Africa’s health data is a mess: some countries run hundreds of parallel, disconnected systems that make it nearly impossible to see the full picture. AI can stitch those fragments into something useful – spotting outbreaks earlier, repositioning medicine stocks before they run dry, redeploying health workers, and directing investment where it will have the most impact.

In the CAR and Nigeria, Dure Technologies’ situation room has clearly demonstrated how multiple disease data with real-time community inputs can improve pandemic preparedness and response.

Health innovation powerhouse

HIEx has been investing in female health entrepreneurs over several years. Across Africa, we are seeing a new generation of entrepreneurs tackling problems that traditional health systems have struggled to solve – building solutions in diagnostics, maternal health, telemedicine, supply chains, AI, climate resilience, pharmaceuticals and fintech. A number of examples are emerging from the Silicon Savannah – echoing what mobile money did via M-Pesa.

Nurturing this must be a priority for health and finance ministries – the African healthcare market is projected to reach approximately $259bn by 2030, with the potential to create around 16m jobs (UNECA). Africa also attracted approximately $70bn of FDI in 2025 (UNCTAD).

The real gap, as Afreximbank’s Haytham Elmaayergi put it in Tangier, isn’t available money but the shortage of scalable, investable healthcare platforms to put it into. African entrepreneurs, if supported appropriately, will be central to overcoming the current dependency on health imports. Africa imports three- quarters of its health commodities, and less than 1% of the vaccines used on the continent are made in Africa.

While traditional pharma manufacturing should be a priority, newer technologies provide an equally attractive entry point. Platforms such as Immuna Therapeutics, which is developing lower-cost decentralised manufacturing of CAR-T and advanced cell-therapy approaches, including in Africa, illustrate what is possible when scientific innovation is combined with an explicit objective of affordability and access.

Decades of health crises have shown how fast an emergency turns into a macroeconomic one. While the old donor-dependent model fades, a different story is taking shape – with a young population, a fast-growing healthcare market, real capital inflows and entrepreneurs solving real problems – and there is an opportunity not only to transform healthcare but for Africa to become a powerhouse in innovation for health.

Africa has spent too long footing the bill for poor health. The next decade should be the one when it invests ahead of the crisis, turning health from a cost into one of its biggest engines of growth.

Pradeep Kakkattil is the founder and CEO of the Geneva-based Health Innovation Exchange (HIEx) and co-founder of Immuna Therapeutics. This article was written with research input from Khanak Yadav, a student researcher.