Discover Medic’s ClimateXHealth initiative with Lwala Community Alliance and its potential to transform health systems into climate-resilient models.
Bridging digital health and climate resilience in Africa
In December 2024, Kenya made history as the first African nation to host the Global Digital Health Forum, spotlighting its leadership in digital health but also the continent’s dual challenges of advancing health access and addressing climate-sensitive infectious diseases (CSIDs).
Several African countries have pioneered digital health transformation, with Kenya digitizing over 106,000 Community Health Promoters to expand and enhance health access and services.
Yet, Africa also remains at the frontline of climate-driven health crises, including the expansion of vector-borne diseases like malaria and dengue into new regions, affecting millions of people every year. In 2023, WHO’s World Malaria Report recorded five million new cases – despite mortality declining.
The report echoed the worrying prediction from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that malaria will continue to spread “further than ever if climate change continues unchecked.”
“Climate change is making us sicker,” Gregory Kuzmak, Health Director at Rockefeller Foundation, warned at this year’s GDHF. “Too many communities continue to fly blind to the impact climate change is having on health.”
At Medic, we find ourselves located at this nexus between climate and health. While we support community health workers delivering critical care, we also recognize the urgent need to build climate-resilient healthcare systems.
That was the motivation behind ClimateXHealth, our initiative with Lwala Community Alliance, which I had the privilege of presenting at GDHF.
A data- and community-driven response to malaria in Kenya
Lwala is a Kenyan-founded, Kenyan-led organization with a presence in Migori and Homa Bay – two of the nation’s malaria-endemic counties. According to the 2019 National Population Census, Migori County faces a higher risk of contracting malaria through infectious mosquitoes, a high poverty rate of 48%, and a high, dense population of 1.2 million, with under-fives representing 16%.
Together, we mapped out long-term, open-source weather datasets including temperature, precipitation, and humidity, as well as malaria case data from the DHIS2-based Kenya Health Information System, and pre-processed the data into monthly indicators for each of the eight constituencies for both counties.
From there, we adopted and adapted the World Health Organisation’s Early Warning, Alert and Response System for climate-sensitive diseases, in order to predict future malaria caseload and develop appropriate interventions across the different stages of alarm: no response, initial response, and late emergency response. These interventions are adapted to each response phase, and include:
- surveillance and monitoring
- preventive measures
- health education and community engagement
- case management
- resource mobilization
- sustainability and capacity building, and
- policy development and advocacy
Integrating climate data into health systems
Data can and should play a significant role in building climate-resilient health systems. However, at GDHF Dr. Joy Shumake-Guillemot from the WHO/WMO Joint Office for Climate and Health pointed out that right now only 23% of Ministries of Health are systematically using climate information in their surveillance of CSIDs.
“There is tremendous, untapped potential in bringing these two communities and their scientific intelligence together,” she urged.
With DHIS2 now integrating climate data, Medic sees an opportunity to incorporate EWARS-csd into the wider health system. By fostering collaborations between health and climate experts and equipping community health workers with these tools, we can temper health systems against the effects of climate change and safeguard the wellbeing of vulnerable communities.