Publications

In 2023, the World Health Organization Regional Office for Africa adopted a new strategy for Ending Disease in Africa (ENDISA) 2023-2030. The strategy defined the vision, strategies, and key interventions for enabling the African Region to achieve disease eradication, elimination, and control goals by 2030, focusing on communicable, noncommunicable, and neglected tropical diseases. Promoting the use of precision public health (PPH) to inform decisions aimed at ending diseases is one of the four special initiatives of ENDISA 2023-2030. The aim of this initiative is to promote and support effective use of data and analytics to inform decisions related to disease eradication, elimination, and control at all levels of health systems and international partnerships. The COVID-19 pandemic response and subnational tailoring of interventions for malaria approach have demonstrated the need for building a data use culture to inform public health interventions and improve their effectiveness. In addition, digital health is rapidly advancing towards embracing analytics and artificial intelligence, and this strategy reflects the ways in which such opportunities can be leveraged in public health to bolster efforts across each of these areas of disease control, elimination, and eradication. It is critical for public health in Africa to use progress made in computational methods and technology, machine learning, geoscience, and mathematical modelling to support disease control efforts.