…Say 98.5 % of pilot health projects fail due to lack of sustainability, funding

About 98.5 percent of the numerous pilot health projects going on in Nigeria and Africa fail due to lack of sustainability, financing, integration, and large-scale adoption.
Consequently, stakeholders in the health sector have emphasized the need to scale up digital health innovations and accelerating the adoption of sustainable digital solutions that improve health outcomes across Nigeria and Africa.
They noted that wile significant investments have been made in digital health solutions across the continent, many innovations continue to face challenges related to sustainability, financing, integration, governance, and large-scale adoption.

At a roundtable with the theme, ” From Pilot to Scale, Shaping the Future of Health Innovation, the health experts advance practical approaches for moving digital health innovations from pilots to sustainable scale.
Speaking at the event, Technical Director of The Network for Health Equity and Development (NHED) Dr Jerome Mafeni noted that despite the multiplicity of pilot health programmes and digital programmes that are being run not just within the country but across the entire continent, so much resources are invested in running small pilots that never eventually get funded even when the results show clearly that they work for the benefit of the vast majority.
Mafeni pointed out that the event is help key stakeholders across the entire health system value chain to look at how to move away from investing in multiple small pilot programmes that never get funded to be implemented at scale, at national, regional or global levels.

He noted that the Nigeria’s health system is heavily fragmented, largely inefficient and does not deliver to promise.
Mafeni stated that Nigeria has a very poor health indices and stressed the need to improve efficiency, effectiveness, ensure better supervision for quality service delivery.
He pointed out that countries are increasingly leveraging digital technologies to improve policies, service delivery, disease surveillance, programme management, and demand creation for better health outcomes.

Mafeni underscored the importance of strengthening collaboration, highlighting innovations and identifying opportunities to accelerate the adoption of sustainable digital health solutions that contribute to stronger, more responsive, and data-driven health systems for better health outcomes.
He explained that the engagement is expected to generate insights and recommendations on how governments, development partners, implementing organisations, technology providers, and the private sector can work together to accelerate the scale-up of proven digital health innovations and strengthen health systems across Africa.
Also speaking, the Managing Director Health Technologies, Paul Bhuhi that research has shown that out of about 1000 Pilot health programmes going on in Africa at any given time, about 500 of them are in Nigeria while 98.5 percent of the projects fail due to their inability to attract funding because they lack large-scale adoption. .

Bhuhi observed that the quantum of money wasted on these failed pilot programmes could be invested in helping people improve their health and stressed the need to advance practical approaches for moving digital health innovations from pilots to sustainable scale.
He said, “The problem we are trying to help solve today is that there are so many pilots going on across Nigeria and Africa, when only one percent of them succeed, and it’s actually between 1 and 1.5 percent across Africa. Think of the money that has gone into all of those pilots for 98.5 percent of them to fail”.

” Isn’t it amazing that people invest in all of those pilots, let’s say 500 in Nigeria, knowing that only four or five are going to succeed.
So what we are trying to do today is get people to change their thinking to say let’s actually design with the end in mind because what we also know is that when you do a pilot what you learn is with respect to the pilot and when you scale it up you have to start again. So why not start with the end in mind and actually create something that brings you a national scale solution with massive impact”.

On his part, Mr Chibueze Adirieje of the Institute of Human Virology Nigeria (IHVN) stressed the need for Nigeria to embrace innovation in health system planning to improve outcomes.
He noted that there have been efforts to gather accurate data in the healthcare space but the major challenges has been how to use it effectively.

Adireje stated that an AI-powered tools like AIM250 has been developed to enable smarter decisions, stronger coordination, and data-driven action in transforming health outcomes across Nigeria.
He said, “What this initiative has done since 2024 is provide a single platform where data is aggregated, monitored and analysed through an AI-enabled system. We need information to plan, and that information is data. We need a harmonised health information systems for effective planning and improved health outcomes”.

Adireje explained that AIM250 system focuses not only on cleaning data but also on ensuring its accuracy and usefulness for decision-making.