Health Data Belongs to Communities: IME's Position on Data Sovereignty

"IME's position is straightforward: health data generated in African countries should stay in African countries. African health data should benefit African patients first. And the governance of that data should be led by African institutions, informed by African priorities."

Data sovereignty is not the most visible topic in global health. It does not generate headlines. It does not photograph well. But it may be one of the most consequential issues shaping the future of healthcare on the African continent — and one of the most revealing tests of whether global health partnerships are genuinely equitable or merely well-intentioned.

This is not a negotiating position. It is a principle.

The urgency is driven by converging forces. Africa's health systems are digitizing rapidly. Electronic health records, mobile health applications, AI-driven diagnostics — these are no longer pilot projects. They are becoming infrastructure. With that digitization comes an enormous volume of clinical data, and with that data comes a question that has not yet been adequately answered: who owns it, who controls it, and who benefits from it?

Simultaneously, the regulatory landscape is maturing. South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), which came into full effect in July 2021, establishes a legal foundation for health data processing that closely aligns with the EU's GDPR. Across the continent, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) has published comprehensive Health Information Exchange Guidelines, developed by a 24-member task force and validated across all African Union regions.

These are not abstract frameworks. They are enforceable standards, and they are raising the bar for every institution that handles African health data. The question is not whether African health data will be governed. It is by whom, and on whose terms.

For IME, data sovereignty translates into specific commitments. It means that when we engage with technology partners — whether established platforms like Globalmed and Zane Networks or emerging innovators like Turbomedics — we evaluate them against a clear standard: can African patients' data be protected under African governance frameworks? If the architecture does not support that, the partnership does not proceed.

It means that IME's own initiatives, including the AI4AfricanHealth program, are designed with data sovereignty as a structural requirement, not an afterthought. The institutions we partner with — from Morgan State University to Ashesi University to the University of Ghana College of Health Sciences — are expected to uphold the same standard.

It means that our engagement with standards bodies like SAHIA, HELINA, and the International Society for Telemedicine and eHealth (ISfTeH) is oriented toward building the normative frameworks that make data sovereignty enforceable, not just aspirational.

The alternative is already visible. AI systems trained primarily on Western data consistently underperform on African populations — misdiagnosing conditions on darker skin tones, failing to account for genetic variations, and reinforcing the very health disparities they claim to address.

When African health data is extracted, processed abroad, and returned as proprietary algorithms sold back to African health systems, the pattern is extractive, regardless of the intentions behind it. Data sovereignty is the structural answer to that pattern.

In 2027, the AI4AfricanHealth Conference will devote significant attention to this issue. It will not be a panel discussion that checks a box. It will be a working conversation about the governance frameworks, technical architectures, and institutional commitments required to make data sovereignty real.