Watch the recording here.

 

A new phase of global health innovation is taking shape — one that is moving beyond promising pilots and well-designed tools toward deeper alignment with the local systems that must ultimately own and sustain them.

On April 30, the Alliance convened leaders from Amp Health and Google Research Africa for a Chatham House Rules session moderated by eHealth Africa that explored what it takes to build country-led ecosystems that can scale global health innovation. The conversation moved beyond broad calls for “country ownership” to examine what this actually requires in practice: trust, co-creation, embedded support, local governance, and a willingness by external partners to work through existing systems rather than around them.

“There is a shift from country ownership as language to country ownership as architecture; from innovations being delivered to a country, to innovations being shaped, owned, and integrated by the country; from scale defined only by reach, to scale defined by whether the system can carry the innovation when the original partner steps back,” shared Ota Akhigbe, director of partnerships and programs at eHealth Africa, grounding the conversation in the practical realities of what it takes for innovation to last.

Key Takeaways

• Country leadership must come first. Governments should define the problem, priorities, use case, and measures of success from the start.
• Co-creation builds trust. Working through existing systems may take longer, but it supports lasting adoption and sustainability.
• Private sector partners should act as facilitators. Rather than providing finished solutions, private sector partners should enable local innovators with tools and technical support.
• Funding constraints make government prioritization essential. Countries must decide where external support can add the most value.
• The strongest models build capacity that lasts. Embedded support should strengthen government teams, policies, and systems so innovation can continue after external partners step back.

 

Global to Local: A Model Centering Government Leadership

“The role [of the management partner] is to be a thought partner, to provide new frameworks for thinking about an issue, to help teams work better together, but never to dictate a direction or an outcome.” — Rhys Johnstone, Amp Health

Shifting power from global to local requires embedded support that begins with listening and trust-building, helping government partners define their own goals and lead the work needed to achieve them.

Amp Health’s embedded support model places mid-career professionals, often with a mix of private and public management experience, inside government teams for one to three years, with the goal of strengthening the people and systems that will carry the work forward. These professionals work alongside government teams day to day — going into the field, sitting in the office with the team, and sharing in their struggles and successes.

“The role [of the management partner] is to be a thought partner, to provide new frameworks for thinking about an issue, to help teams work better together, but never to dictate a direction or an outcome,” Rhys Johnson, director of learning at Amp Health, emphasized, noting that one of the hardest parts of being an embedded management partner is resisting the temptation to “jump in and fix things” that appear broken. 

This is especially important in cross-sectoral initiatives like Ghana’s Country Innovation Platform, where the role of the embedded partner was to “coach the system” — helping government, innovators, and funders strengthen role clarity, communication, and mutual respect, while recognizing when global partners need to step back and let government lead.

The embedded model was also designed to reduce mistrust and build sustainability. One speaker explained that for Ghana Health Service, part of the work was helping government partners create a policy or a strategy on how they intended to utilize digital health tools, so it could become “a guiding principle” after the external partner left — ensuring that continued use of the tools did not depend on the partner remaining in place.

 

What Needs to Change: A Shift to Genuine Co-Creation

“If you want things to get done, then you just have to work through the existing systems and not replicate or set up your parallel systems to make yours faster.”

Country-led innovation requires external partners to change how they show up. As one speaker reflected, when partners fail to engage the government as true leaders, ministries may feel they are being used as a “rubber stamp” and brought into a process only after key decisions have already been made. It is important that external partners do not bypass government systems for speed, arrive with assumptions already made, or treat ministries as validators after the fact.

“You’re not meeting people who do not know what they want…You’re not meeting people who cannot do anything unless you appear,” one speaker shared, noting that government teams may be stretched and under-resourced, but they know their priorities and challenges. 

Instead, partners should enter with the intention to listen, build trust, and respect existing priorities and processes. “[The first step is] co-creation from a place of real understanding, from a place of respect, and from a place of giving government partners the opportunity to use their voice, because they have one. As a partner, you are there to learn and understand what they want,” one speaker expressed.

 

The Role of the Private Sector in the Innovation Ecosystem

Abdoulaye Diack, program manager, AI and machine learning at Google Research Africa, framed the role of private sector and technology partners as one of facilitation: providing tools, models, datasets, and research infrastructure that local innovators and health systems can adapt to their own contexts, rather than showing up with finished solutions.

Across the ecosystem, many innovators are working within the same constraints such as limited data, compute, and infrastructure, influencing them to use artificial intelligence (AI) to augment frontline workers while prioritizing technologies that can reach people where they are, including SMS, local-language tools, and offline functionality.

“What I’ve seen to be successful is when innovators use technology that can reach the most people… The AI system needs to be able to understand [the local] context for it to be useful,” Diack shared.

Johnstone also emphasized that effective public-private partnerships must begin with government-defined priorities, allowing governments to define the problem, the use case, and what success looks like. “[For the private sector partner], it’s about supporting efforts around developing governance frameworks, building capacity, creating the conditions under which that solution can thrive, rather than just looking very narrowly at the technology,” shared Johnstone.

 

Country Ownership in a Constrained Funding Environment

The speakers cautioned against framing country-led ownership and global funding as competing priorities. Public health remains a global concern that requires global investment, but governments must lead decisions about which problems are prioritized and how they are addressed. That distinction is especially important in today’s constrained funding environment. While recent funding cuts have intensified pressure, speakers emphasized that resource scarcity is not new for many public health teams, noting how in some settings, government teams have long operated without basic infrastructure.

“There will always be constraints, but given those constraints, what is within [the local government’s] control? How can they allocate and steward their resources most effectively, and how can they make the case for additional resources?” Johnstone highlighted.

Rather than making country-led models less viable, these constraints make country ownership more important. One speaker noted that when funds are limited, countries need to decide where external support is most needed and which challenges should take priority. In this sense, country ownership is not a substitute for funding; it is what helps ensure limited resources are directed toward the priorities countries define for themselves. Country-led innovation is not slower innovation; it is more durable innovation.

Watch the recording here.

 

Speaker Bios

Ota Akhigbe, Director of Partnerships and Programs, eHealth Africa

Ota Akhigbe is a Pan-African executive leader with 17+ years of senior leadership across financial services, public–private partnerships, and digitally enabled health systems. As Director of Partnerships & Programs at eHealth Africa, she sits on the executive leadership team of one of Africa’s leading public health organisations, with oversight of government partnerships, institutional positioning, and the integration of digital public infrastructure into national and sub-national health systems across fragile and emerging contexts. Her work sits at the seam where ambitious innovation meets institutional accountability. She advises Executive Directors, Group leadership, and founder teams on the governance, sustainability, and system-embedded design required to move innovation from pilot into country-owned scale, and holds advisory board roles across digital health enterprises in Africa. Ota convenes and moderates at global forums including UNGA, where she co-hosted the 2025 Africa-Led Innovation Dialogue, the Global Digital Health Forum, the Africa Health Tech Summit, AHAIC, and UN CSW among others. She holds executive certifications from Harvard and Columbia, is completing an MBA in Strategy at Edinburgh Business School, and works across West, East, North, and Southern Africa.

 

Abdoulaye Diack, Ghana, Program Manager, AI and Machine Learning, Google Research

Abdoulaye Diack is a Program Manager at Google Research with over 20 years of leadership in engineering and applied AI. Specializing in solutions for the Global South, he focuses on scaling innovations that drive sustainable community development. As a seasoned advisor to university boards, researchers, and startups, Abdoulaye is deeply committed to mentoring and empowering the next generation of African tech talent.

 

 

Rhys Johnstone, Director of Learning, Amp Health

Rhys Johnstone is the Director of Learning at Amp Health and has extensive experience developing and delivering learning interventions for senior managers and teams across the public sector. He has designed and facilitated active learning interventions in leadership and innovation with government leaders in Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, Malawi, Guyana, Namibia and Zambia. He has also coached clients in the financial services, technology and other sectors in South Africa. Rhys is part-time faculty at GIBS business school in South Africa, where he conducted PhD research into experiential learning and also lecturers, coaches, and supervises students on the MBA and MPhil programs. Rhys is an ICF coach (ACC) and trained as a mindfulness teacher at the University of Stellenbosch and the Institute for Mindfulness South Africa. Previously, he had 15 years’ experience at a senior management level in the private sector, specializing in digital operations and product development. 

 

Chioma Ogbozor, Leadership and Management Advisor, Amp Health

Chioma Ogbozor is a senior health systems leader, strategic board advisor, and management partner with extensive experience driving public sector transformation across Africa. She serves as a strategic board advisor for Exeed SOLO and Exeed Playbook, and mentors postgraduate students in business leadership. Chioma completed a PhD research and an M.Phil in Business Leadership and Management from Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia in partnership with Exeed College, and is an alumna of Saïd Business School. She has led national health teams to generate and integrate contextually relevant data into health systems by strengthening leadership and management capacity across teams in Nigeria, Liberia, and Ghana, with a focus on building resilient, locally responsive, and evidence-driven systems. Currently a Leadership and Management Advisor with Amp Health, she previously supported the integration of digital and non-digital innovations into Ghana’s health system through the Country Innovation Platform. She also serves on the board of an NGO in Sierra Leone.