DAI’s Global Health and Digital Expertise Highlighted at EDD 2022

June 09, 2022

The 2022 hybrid edition of European Development Days (EDD), held June 21–22, will focus on the European Union’s “Global Gateway: building sustainable partnerships for a connected world.”

DAI will actively contribute to this year’s event through a stand on the UKaid-funded Tackling Deadly Diseases in Africa (TDDA) program; a lunchtime presentation with TDDA technical leads; and participation in a panel about artificial intelligence and health.

Stand: Meet the Tackling Deadly Diseases in Africa team, Global Village Stand 5675

Epidemics are a global threat, killing millions of people each year. Robust health systems need strong institutions, infrastructure, surveillance systems, and well-trained and equipped staff. Without them, disease outbreaks can quickly become epidemics and then pandemics, which devastate lives and livelihoods.

TDDA strengthens health systems, crisis preparedness, and early response mechanisms in Cameroon, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, and Uganda—and worked in Niger until 2021. We work with governments, civil society, and communities, empowering them to achieve their ambitions in health security.

For our TDDA team, one of the most important lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic is that resilience to shocks, particularly in fragile settings, requires participation from a wide range of actors, including those not habitually deployed in health security interventions. Throughout EDD 2022, DAI staff and TDDA technical leads will engage with visitors and share stories from the project.

More on the TDDA stand.

Lunch event: Whose Business is Health Security? June 22, from 13:00 to 14:15 (CET), Room L3

The model developed by TDDA reaches some of the most vulnerable in society (the poorest, refugees, the disabled, and women), empowering local civil society organizations, for instance, to deliver vital community engagement in settings not easily served by formal structures. Our work offers essential insights for program design recognizing that health security is everybody’s business.

At our lunch event on June 22, Claude Cafardy, TDDA’s Manager for Governance and Accountability and Omer Njajou, International Health Regulations & One Health Technical Lead, will share their experience implementing a whole-of-society approach to health security in fragile contexts and adapting to overlapping crises.

Register here.

Lab Debate: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Innovation for the Future of Healthcare, June 22, from 12:05 to 12:50 (CET), Studio 3

The session, organized by Assortis and partners, will bring diverse case studies showing AI application in the health sector, focusing on how AI-powered by data has made healthcare efficient and accessible and how it can lead to innovation in developing countries.

Dr. Miriam Stankovich, Senior Digital Policy Specialist at DAI, presents the main findings from her research paper on “Regulating AI and Big Data Deployment in Healthcare.” The paper, referenced in the latest UNDP Human Development Report 2022, looks to identify both barriers to AI deployment at scale in developing countries and the types of regulatory and public policy actions that can best accelerate the appropriate use of AI to improve healthcare in the context of low- and middle-income countries.

Follow the event on Twitter at #EDD22.