It’s 9 a.m. in a remote village in Nepal, and a community health worker sets out after checking her task list for the day. There is no signal on the road to the households she will visit, and her phone is not a smartphone. None of that stops her. The app works offline, in her language, supporting her as she brings care to families, and syncs when she is back online. This is digital health at the last mile working as it should: health workers supported in their work, communities cared for, and no one left unseen.
For hundreds of thousands of health workers today, it’s their daily lived experience of delivering care at the doorstep using the Community Health Toolkit (CHT). It’s what digital inclusion looks like in practice, the heart of Medic’s work.
We are delighted to share that the CHT was awarded the 2026 Digital@UNGA award for Digital Inclusion at the UN Headquarters in New York this month. This award by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) recognizes and celebrates initiatives that are advancing inclusive, responsible, and people‑centred digital transformation. This year’s Digital Inclusion category drew 620 submissions. We’re honoured to be recognised alongside an inspiring group of finalists from Benin to Haiti to India, working to make digital access more meaningful and equitable for the communities most often left out.
As Zimbabwe’s Minister of Information Communication Technology, Hon. Dr. Tatenda Annastacia Mavetera, put it, “The hardest part of connectivity is not the cable. It is the courage to include.” That line captures what the CHT has always been about. The technology matters, but what makes it work is the choice to design with and for community health workers in the last mile, reaching people the health system has overlooked.
Medic’s Head of Development Rachael Lester accepts the 2026 Digital@UNGA Award for Digital Inclusion from ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin, UNDP Associate Administrator Haoliang Xu, and Zimbabwe’s Minister of Information Communication Technology Hon. Dr. Tatenda Annastacia Mavetera.
Starting with those furthest from care
Too often, digital health tools are built first for the places easiest to reach, and adapted for everyone else later, if at all. At Medic, we start from the other end: Who is furthest from care, and how can we help health workers reach them first?
Inclusion has been at the root of everything at Medic. It’s why we began our first pilot in Malawi in 2010 with simple digital workflows powered by SMS that would work on basic phones that health workers already owned. Today CHT apps run fully offline on low-cost Android phones and sync when connectivity returns. They work in more than 10 languages, and in Nepal, the apps female community health volunteers use run on the Bikram Sambat calendar, so a due date on screen matches the one that governs daily life. All of this is configurable. Each deployment configures its own forms, task schedules, and care protocols to match national guidelines and health worker realities, which is how one toolkit can serve health systems across many different countries, cultures, and contexts.
For nearly two decades, Medic has stewarded the CHT alongside a global community, designing for the hardest realities health workers face: no network, a basic phone, limited power, and a language most software ignores. Because if a tool works for her, it can work for everyone, anywhere.
Why inclusion matters now more than ever
This award comes at an important moment. Global health funding is shrinking, and AI is arriving at the frontline faster than anyone expected or is prepared for. Together, these pressures are already shaping how new technology is built, and who benefits. Across settings, the default path is familiar: new tools reach the best-funded, best-connected systems first, and the health workers serving people furthest from care wait longest.
The CHT was built offline-first for exactly those health workers, and AI in the CHT has to meet the same bar: if it doesn’t work without connectivity, it isn’t ready. We keep returning to the question that has guided our work from the start. Who is still being left out, and what would it take to reach them?
Thank you
We’re grateful to ITU and UNDP for this recognition, and for championing a vision of digital development that leaves no one behind. No single organisation makes a toolkit inclusive, and it certainly doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a community that shares a commitment to reaching everyone and keeps showing up, year after year, to make that commitment real.
This recognition belongs to that community: the Medic team, the organizations and Ministries of Health who shape the open-source Toolkit with us every day, and to the donors and partners who have made this impact possible. Above all, it belongs to community health workers, whose knowledge shapes every tool we build, and whose care reaches every last door.