There is no app for this! Regulating the migration of health data in Africa

Project Summary

With the dramatic increase in the collection of health data in recent years, health apps have been promoted as offering huge advances in the health of people in the Global South, but they also pose risks to privacy and ultimately to health outcomes. The project team will evaluate the data protection regimes and engage with key stakeholders in Kenya, South Africa and Uganda, to establish the extent to which they protect their citizens’ health data, especially in cross-border Health activities.

The interdisciplinary project led by Professor Sharifah Sekalala, Professor Bitange Ndemo and Professor Pamela Andanda seeks to analyse the regulation of health apps in Sub Saharan Africa in Uganda, Kenya and South Africa. Focusing on law, bioethics, entrepreneurship, epidemiology and policy makers, the project aims to bring together various stakeholders to empirically investigate how health apps are operating in practice, whether new forms of regulation are adequate in responding to potential problems, how different stakeholders perceive the regulatory framework and how we can create better regulatory frameworks.

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What's New

Stakeholder perceptions on institutional design of digital health regulatory frameworks: insights from Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda

Prof. Sharifah Sekalala and Mr. Shajoe J. Lake published a paper in Oxford Open Digital Health, exploring how digital health regulatory frameworks are designed and perceived in Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda. Drawing on content analysis and focus group discussions, the paper highlights the importance of trust, patient protection, and context-specific strategies in shaping effective regulation.

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Outputs

Themes

News

Sharifah Sekalala

Principal Investigator

University of Warwick, United Kingdom

Pamela Andanda

Co-Investigator

University of the Witwatersrand,

South Africa

Bitange Ndemo

Co-Investigator

University of Nairobi, Kenya

Contact:

• Email: datamigration@warwick.ac.uk.
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