WHO tests new digital platform in seven African countries to help vaccination campaigns find missed communities

The World Health Organization (WHO) is rolling out a digital platform that is meant to help vaccination campaigns find the communities they miss, starting with seven pilot countries.

WHO's Regional Office for Africa, based in Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo, announced the three-year project in a news release on 25 September 2026.

The project is called the DIGIT Health Campaign Data Digitization Project. WHO said the DIGIT platform gives countries one shared system for planning, managing and monitoring vaccination campaigns, in place of fragmented tools that cannot share information with each other.

WHO described it as open, modular and interoperable, which in plain terms means it is built so that different parts can be added and so that it can work with other systems.

Maps to show who is being missed

WHO said a key feature of DIGIT is mapping.

The system will bring location information together with campaign data, which WHO said will help countries with microplanning, identify underserved populations and monitor implementation in real time.

Microplanning is the detailed local planning of where health workers go and whom they must reach.

Underserved populations are groups of people the health system is not serving well.

Monitoring in real time means seeing where a campaign is reaching communities and where gaps remain while the work is still going on, not weeks later.

WHO said the combination will let teams "better understand where interventions are reaching communities and where gaps remain."

The release describes these as aims. It did not say whether the mapping was used in the one pilot held so far, or what it found.

Why campaigns run on separate tracks

Dr Benido Impouma, Director of the Universal Health Coverage/Communicable and Noncommunicable Diseases Cluster at WHO's Regional Office for Africa, said in the release:

"Health campaigns are some of the most important approaches for delivering preventive interventions to populations not easily reached by routine services. Currently, they are still largely planned and delivered vertically across programmes.

This platform complements the WHO Regional Office for Africa's broader work to strengthen integrated health campaign planning and implementation across programmes."

In plain terms, "vertically" means each disease programme plans and runs its own campaign, with its own tools and its own data.

WHO said countries in the region have made important progress in digital health over the past decade, but that gaps remain in planning complex campaigns, especially when several health measures, partners and data systems have to be coordinated at once.

Who is behind it

The project is led jointly by two parts of WHO's Africa office, its Polio Eradication Programme and its Health Promotion, Disease Prevention and Control Cluster.

They work with the eGov Foundation, the key implementing partner, and have support from the Gates Foundation.

Dr Gedi Mohamed, Coordinator of the WHO AFRO Polio Eradication Programme, said in the release: "The approach is centred on country ownership and data sovereignty.

Rather than creating another stand-alone programme tool, DIGIT is intended to provide a common digital infrastructure through which information can be generated, managed and used across programmes."

The idea is that each country keeps control of its own health information and uses one shared system for it, not a separate tool for each disease programme. T

he release did not explain "data sovereignty" further.

WHO said the wider aim is to speed up the use of joined-up, data-driven digital tools that strengthen health systems, support Universal Health Coverage, meaning access to health care for everyone without financial hardship, and advance the health-related Sustainable Development Goals.

What has been tested so far

The release said preparatory work was first done to improve the platform and set up the technical infrastructure at WHO's Africa office.

A joint mission then went to Chad earlier this year, with representatives from WHO's Polio Eradication Programme, the Gates Foundation, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and the eGov Foundation.

WHO said the talks confirmed strong political commitment to adopting the platform.

That led to the first pilot, in a district of N'Djamena Province during Chad's June 2026 polio vaccination campaign. N'Djamena is Chad's capital.

WHO described the pilot as an important first step towards using the platform in real operations and drawing lessons for wider use.

The platform also builds on digital tools already in use.

WHO said that in polio priority countries, health workers now submit campaign information electronically, which lets programme teams see results more quickly than with paper reports.

WHO also said the eGov Foundation's earlier health campaign work, on which DIGIT builds, has covered 40 million people across Africa.

What is still unknown

WHO's release did not report results from the Chad pilot, so it is not yet known whether DIGIT helped a campaign find communities it would otherwise have missed.

It also did not name the seven pilot countries, say whether Chad is one of them, or say when testing will start in the others.

The 40 million figure is WHO's description of its partner's earlier work, and the release gave no breakdown of it.

Next, WHO said participating countries will be brought together to check how ready they are, adapt the work to their own conditions and strengthen how they coordinate campaigns.

WHO and its partners will also support them with spatial data analysis, which means studying information tied to places, with training, and with building geospatial tools into national health systems.