What's Next: The Road to 2027: The Questions IME Is Asking

"The 2027 AI4AfricanHealth Conference is not a conference where solutions built elsewhere are presented for African adoption. It will be a platform for African-led innovation — for the clinicians, informaticians, technologists, and policymakers who are building the future."

The Next Chapter

IME has been doing this work since 1997. In that time, the organization has evolved from medical missions to physician exchanges, from exchanges to academic partnerships, from academic partnerships to a convened network spanning continents, sectors, and disciplines.

The next chapter is already taking shape. It is not a departure from what came before. It is a continuation — applying the relationships, the standards, and the lessons accumulated over nearly three decades to one of the most consequential questions in global health today.

The AI4AfricanHealth Conference — 2027

In 2027, IME will convene the AI4AfricanHealth Conference — an event designed not to showcase technology, but to advance the conversation about how artificial intelligence can responsibly and effectively strengthen health systems across the African continent.

This will not be a conference where solutions built elsewhere are presented for African adoption. It will be a platform for African-led innovation — for the clinicians, informaticians, technologists, and policymakers who are building the future of African health on their own terms.

The conference will bring together the full range of IME's network: academic partners, technology innovators, standards bodies, ministries of health, funding institutions, and multilateral organizations whose participation turns conversation into implementation.

The Questions on the Table

IME is not arriving at this conference with all the answers. We are arriving with the right questions — and with the partners to address them rigorously:

• Deploying Diagnostics: How can AI-enabled diagnostics be deployed in settings where connectivity is intermittent and power is unreliable — not as a pilot, but at national scale?
• Data Sovereignty & Governance: What governance frameworks are needed to ensure that African health data used to train AI models remains under African control, governed by African institutions, and accountable to African communities?
• Normative Standards: How can standards bodies like SAHIA and HELINA accelerate the development of interoperability frameworks that make cross-border health data exchange safe, ethical, and practical?
• Context-Aware Intelligence: What does context-aware AI look like when it is built on African data, informed by African clinical expertise, and designed for the infrastructure realities of African health systems — not retrofitted from models developed elsewhere?

These are not abstract questions. They are the operational challenges that will determine whether AI becomes a meaningful force for health improvement across the continent or another imported solution that fails at the point of care.

An Invitation, Not a Presentation

The 2027 conference is not IME's event. It is the network's event. The agenda will be shaped by the institutions that participate. The working groups will be led by the people doing the implementation work. The outcomes will be owned by the community that forms around them.

If your institution is working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and African health systems — whether as a researcher, a clinician, a technology builder, a policymaker, or a funder — this is a conversation you belong in.

Details on the conference — location, dates, themes, and how to participate — will be announced in the coming months. What matters now is that the right people know this convening is coming, and that they begin to see themselves in it.

IME has spent nearly thirty years building the network that makes a conversation like this possible. The road to 2027 is the path toward putting that network to its highest purpose.