Digital Health in Africa: Advancing Equitable Care for Maternal and Child Health, Rare Diseases, and Infectious Disease Management

This Research Topic is linked to the Digital Health Africa 2025 Conference (September 3–4, 2025), building on the successful DHA-2024 initiative. Africa faces significant health challenges, including maternal and child mortality rates that are substantially higher than global averages. However, digital health innovations, particularly AI, telemedicine, and precision medicine, offer unprecedented opportunities to address these challenges.

The continent is undergoing rapid digital transformation in healthcare, with countries like Kenya, Rwanda, Nigeria, and South Africa implementing innovative AI-powered diagnostic tools, telemedicine platforms, and mobile health solutions. Despite this progress, significant barriers persist, including infrastructure gaps where many health facilities lack stable electricity or internet access.

This Research Topic explores how digital technologies can transform healthcare delivery for Africa’s most vulnerable populations, with emphasis on maternal and child health, rare pediatric diseases, infectious disease management, and antimicrobial stewardship.

We seek to advance evidence-based digital health interventions in Africa by:

1. Documenting successful implementations
2. Establishing best practices for AI and telemedicine in resource-limited settings
3. Informing policy development
4. Building the evidence base for precision medicine applications in African populations

We invite contributions that examine digital health, telemedicine, and AI applications in African healthcare—especially on the following themes (but not limited to):

• Maternal and Child Health: Digital technologies, including remote monitoring systems, telemedicine platforms, mobile applications, and community health worker tools for improving obstetric, pediatric, and maternal care delivery.
• Rare Pediatric Diseases: Digital solutions encompassing patient registries, computer-assisted diagnostics, telemedicine specialist networks, and genetic counseling platforms for rare disease surveillance and management.
• Infectious Diseases & Antimicrobial Stewardship: Digital surveillance systems, automated resistance monitoring, vaccination platforms, electronic stewardship programs, and outbreak response technologies.
• Precision Medicine & Pharmacometrics: Personalized treatment, pharmacometric modeling, digital pharmacovigilance, and precision dosing adapted for African populations and resource-limited settings.

Submission Types: Original research articles, policy and regulatory analyses, case studies from African contexts, perspective and opinion papers.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Clinical Trial
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Clinical Trial
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Digital Health, Telemedicine, African Healthcare, Maternal and Child Health, Infectious Disease Management, Rare Diseases, Precision Medicine, Antimicrobial Stewardship, Health Equity, Mobile Health

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.