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.