Africa carries approximately 24% of the global disease burden, yet has only 3% of the world’s health workforce.
For those of us living and working on the continent, these figures represent a daily reality. We see it in the immense pressure placed on our health systems and the community health workers who form the backbone of care. Supporting them with reliable digital tools is fundamental to ensuring that household visits, referrals, and patient trust remain at the center of care delivery.
High-performing technology is a requirement for resilient health systems. Since joining the Medic Board in 2022, I have seen how stable systems support health workers and their partners to act with confidence. Today, I am honoured to share a significant milestone in how we steward that technology for the long term.
Introducing Medic Afya
Medic Afya is a Kenya-based, African-led entity emerging from Medic. This transition is rooted in a clear principle: national digital health systems are most resilient when they are treated as local public goods—built, managed, and governed by the people they serve.
Being African-led is a technical and operational advantage. Systems designed and maintained close to their environment are inherently better at adapting to local needs. This transition allows us to align our priorities and funding directly with the national eCHIS roadmaps of our government partners. Roadmaps that sit within a broader continental agenda: Africa’s growing assertion that health security and health sovereignty are inseparable.
Ensuring that every investment is synchronized with sovereign health goals is not only good systems design; it is how the continent builds the resilience to respond to future health threats on its own terms. By prioritizing open-source standards and interoperability, we are laying the foundational architecture that allows investment in digital public infrastructure to be realized as sector-wide value. It’s the layer that enables knowledge, data, and services to flow across a fragmented system, rather than remain trapped within it.
This is an evolution of a 15-year legacy.
Medic Afya carries forward institutional knowledge and deep partnerships that have already proven themselves at scale. The team that has driven this work for over a decade now, embedded in the communities, governments, and health systems they serve, remains in place, bringing continuity of relationships and hard-won expertise that no transition can replicate. For our funding and scaling partners, this represents a seamless, de-risked evolution by preserving institutional stability while maximizing the efficiency of proximate leadership.
To date, this work has reached 19 countries across the continent, supporting over 140,000 community health workers and supervisors. Most importantly, these efforts have opened up access to quality, timely, and affordable care for millions of people.
We remain a major contributor to the Community Health Toolkit (CHT) and other digital public goods. Our mandate is to move health systems past pilots toward national infrastructure, solving the mature challenges of reliability, security and stability for systems that support millions.
As we look ahead, Medic Afya will serve as a center of excellence for scaled digital health platforms across Africa. Built in and led from Africa, Medic Afya will champion locally driven innovation, strengthen regional expertise, and support countries to build resilient digital health systems on their own terms. Our goal is to ensure that the future of digital health is not simply implemented in Africa, but increasingly designed, led, and sustained from it.
There is a profound sense of possibility in building this mission from within. We are creating a space where the expertise to manage and evolve these systems lives here, in Africa, near to the communities we serve.
Realizing this vision requires leadership that is equally rooted in the continent: in its systems, its communities, and its possibilities.
Welcoming Dr. Ryan Nyotu as Executive Director
To lead this next chapter, we are proud to welcome Dr. Ryan Nyotu as Medic Afya’s inaugural Executive Director.
Dr. Nyotu is one of Kenya’s foremost digital health architects. He is a physician, entrepreneur, and policy leader whose career has been defined by building systems that work at scale, within government, and for the communities that need them most. His appointment reflects exactly the kind of Africa-rooted, mission-driven leadership that Medic Afya was created to center.
As the inaugural head of the country’s first Division of Digital Health at Kenya’s Ministry of Health, Dr. Nyotu helped establish it from the ground up. He contributed to the design of its structure and advanced Kenya’s digital health policy architecture; stewarding the Digital Health Superhighway’s architectural design and playing a pivotal role in the passing of the Digital Health Act 2023, which anchored digital health implementation in Kenyan law.
Subsequently, as founding Project Director at Apeiro Kenya, he was part of the leadership team that oversaw the deployment of digital health infrastructure across 47 counties and more than 8,000 facilities in under five months. His work on the eCHIS has supported more than 107,000 community health promoters nationwide, serving millions of households.
Dr. Nyotu is also the founder of AfyaPress Africa, holds international patents in healthcare technology, and is a Mandela Rhodes Award laureate in Leadership and Entrepreneurship. He brings to Medic Afya a rare convergence: deep clinical grounding, policy architecture experience, entrepreneurial instinct, and a proven ability to navigate the intersection of government, technology, and frontline health delivery.
Most importantly, Dr. Nyotu shares Medic Afya’s foundational belief: that technology must build in local ownership from day one, rather than extend external dependency, and that the measure of success is not a tool deployed, but a system that endures.
A New Era of Stewardship
The challenge for digital health in Africa is no longer simply building tools, but ensuring that knowledge, evidence, and systems translate into reliable performance at national scale. Medic Afya was created to focus on this mandate, closing the gap between what we know works and what actually reaches people, working alongside a growing ecosystem of partners in policy, advocacy, and implementation.
Our launch marks a broader shift: from pilots to infrastructure, from external support to local stewardship, and from participation to sovereign ownership. It is also a shift in how knowledge moves from evidence that sits in reports to evidence embedded in the systems that deliver care. While our work is built for Africa, we are committed to sharing these innovations and the learning behind them with the global community.
As I look ahead, I am excited for what lies before us. With Dr. Ryan Nyotu at the helm, Medic Afya begins this next chapter with strong roots, local leadership, and clear ambition.
We invite our partners and collaborators to join us in this next chapter. Together, we aren’t just building tools; we are building the connective tissue that turns evidence into action – laying the foundations for resilient, responsive, and locally led health systems across Africa.
