Welcome to the companion website for the upcoming Digital Innovations to Improve Maternal and Child Health in Africa Accelerator Workshop.  We are very excited for this event, taking place on Monday, October 30 – Tuesday, October 31, 2023, and we look forward to seeing everyone soon.  Please feel free to explore this website.  We will strive to make sure that the most up-to-date information is installed.  Thank you.

Executive Summary

Digital health interventions offer great promise for addressing persistent challenges to high-quality maternal and child health (MCH). Our primary focus is implementation in sub‐Saharan Africa; however, these conversations will generalize to many resource-limited settings where the potential of these interventions is often limited by a lack of resources, enabling environments, and intradisciplinary and intrasector collaborations. Many innovative digital ideas for tackling MCH remain in the pilot phase and never reach the target end‐users at scale. In this Academic Ventures Accelerator Workshop, we will bring together experts from academia, health programs, and policy leaders, funding agencies, and the private sector to explore the potential for digital innovations to address the needs of mothers and their children in sub‐Saharan Africa and to outline a strategy for long‐term collaboration to deliver a process, in essence, a translational science, for moving past the pilot stage and bringing these innovations to scale. The goals of this science are to make the process more predictable, effective, and efficient. Over the 1.5-day workshop, we will: a) develop a framework for pathways that take digital innovation ideation to full-scale implementation and b) determine a strategy for our group’s long‐term collaboration.

Workshop Organizers

Adeline A. Boatin, Assistant Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology, Harvard Medical School

Bethany Hedt-Gauthier, Associate Professor in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School

This event is co-sponsored by the Harvard Global Health Institute