26-30 June 2023, Lomé, Togo
Background
In June 2021, the WHO African Regional Office (WHO AFRO) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) organized a Virtual Technical Workshop on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Health with around 200 participants from 47 countries. The workshop featured a number of speakers from international organizations, non-governmental organizations, academia and others, and among the main recommendations of the workshop was the need to focus on issues critical to deploying AI in Africa. This includes prioritizing data protection, sharing protocols, training and creating platforms for strong governance, AI regulations and ethical guidelines, as well as ensuring an enabling policy environment.
The 2021 technical workshop was followed by a Ministerial side event of the Regional Committee in 2022, with WHO Regional Director for Africa Dr. Matshidiso Moeti and Togo’s Minister of Digital Economy and Transformation, Sina Lawson, targeting policy makers. This event attracted several health and ICT ministers, as well as several heads of delegation to the RC. He pointed out that member states are ready to advance the work on AI in health in Africa by developing the right policies and governance structures to enhance the adoption of AI and other digital technologies to transform the health sector in the African region. However, the region should strengthen its capabilities in the ethical use of AI for health.
To harness the power of AI to fast-track UHC and other health-related goals, the WHO Regional Office for Africa (Afro) has launched a plan in collaboration with development partners including the International Telecommunication Union and WHO Headquarters and USAID. To organize a technical workshop on ethics and management to advance the work on AI in Africa. This workshop provides essential knowledge and skills of digital health focal points to develop, use and manage AI-based health technology. It also facilitates the creation of specific activities for the overall implementation of digital health strategies at the national level. The workshop will include specific AI use cases in service sectors such as telemedicine.
Context
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has great potential to improve health outcomes, help countries achieve universal health coverage, and save lives during health emergencies like the Covid-19 pandemic. To fully realize the potential of AI to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, it is necessary to address issues such as ethics, governance and human rights issues, improve data quality, manage and share existing data appropriately, and ultimately work collaboratively. Building trust in data and using it to inform strategic planning.
Objectives of the workshop
The main objective of the workshop is to train digital health focal points from the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Information Communication Technology and to train the focal points of the World Health Organization.
Specific Objectives of the Workshop:-
- Discuss global and regional strategies on digital health, as well as digital health governance and networks connected to AI.
- Discuss and identify key opportunities and challenges in digital health and ethics, including, for example, artificial intelligence, telemedicine as emerging issues during the Covid-19 pandemic.
- Discuss the modules of the online course ‘Artificial Intelligence for Health Ethics and Management’.
- Foster dialogue and collaboration among stakeholders to promote AI ethics and governance in health.
Expected results
The expected outcomes of the workshop are as follows.
- Based on the country’s AI status, country actions for AI in health are identified or prioritized
- Experiences and lessons on the implementation of national AI are recorded.
- The country’s opportunities and challenges in artificial intelligence and key issues in AI for health ethics and management are identified and documented.
- Countries trained in online course modules ‘Artificial Intelligence for Health Ethics and Management’.
- They discussed ways to develop dialogue and collaboration with partners at the national level to promote the responsible use of AI in health.
- Strengthening decisions and improving policies on management and AI for health ethics.
In the year A review meeting was planned for 25-27 April 2023 in Brazzaville. The meeting aims to bring together various donors and actors contributing to the WHO – ITU Digital Health Education Programme.
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