In September 2021, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) announced the launch of the Partner2Connect (P2C) Digital Coalition to drive meaningful connectivity and digital transformation in communities across the globe.

P2C’s bold moves to inspire transformational change align with Elle International’s efforts to enable connectivity for the provision of women’s health across Sub-Saharan Africa. Pledges for P2C focus on four areas: Connecting People Everywhere, Empowering Communities, Building Digital Ecosystems, and Incentivising Investments.

Across Sub-Saharan Africa, women face barriers to care, diagnosis, and treatment. Health burdens for women are systematically underestimated, with data being absent or datasets excluding or undervaluing important conditions. In addition, there has been lower investment, relative to prevalence, in health conditions specifically affecting women, reinforcing a cycle of weaker scientific understanding about women’s bodies and limited data to de-risk new investment.

In addressing the women’s health gap, Elle has committed to establishing South Africa as a prominent and influential player in the women’s health ecosystem globally. Doing so can create and stimulate new industries based on technological convergence, harnessing the transformative potential of digital solutions for economic and societal benefit, especially in pursuit of eradicating barriers to receiving quality healthcare.

With this commitment in mind, I’m grateful for the opportunity to share that Elle has made the following commitments to the P2C Digital Coalition under the focus area of Value Creation – Building Digital Ecosystems:

  • We pledge to provision the digital platforms of ElleHealth, ElleStudies, and Womany, to advance patient information, research, education and diagnostics for millions of women and girls to reduce suffering and improve quality of life.
  • We pledge to drive connectivity and digital transformation in communities through the smart menstrual health dispenser, Moxie, incorporating connectivity through cellular, Wi-Fi, LoRa, and satellite.
  • We pledge to support the Elle Sub-Saharan Africa Consortium for open sourcing AI models and related artifacts as benchmarks to advance open science in women’s health.

ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin underscored the importance of pledges like these to establish universal, meaningful connectivity. “Elle International’s commitment to the Partner2Connect Digital Coalition represents a major step forward in our mission to leave no one behind in the digital era. I am excited about the possibilities of leveraging emerging technologies to tackle critical women’s health issues, and confident that pledges like these bring us closer to a more inclusive, equitable, and connected world for everyone.”

Women’s health though, is often simplified to include only sexual and reproductive health. This substantially underrepresents women’s health burden. Such myopia has resulted in failures to advance research related to various women’s health conditions, in particular the early onset of perimenopause, menopause, infertility, premenstrual syndrome, endometriosis, and polycystic ovary syndrome. While recognising problems in their full context, we at Elle have worked to boil solutions down to the simplest form.

With these three pledges, therefore, Elle is provisioning platforms in advance for at-home diagnosis of endometriosis. The aim for the diagnostic tests are to be roughly equivalent in form, function, cost, and accuracy to the latest generation of pregnancy tests, thus enabling the provision of diagnostics to millions across Sub-Saharan Africa. The bioassay and biosensor for endometriosis include AI diagnostic models for enhanced accuracy. This precedes the rollout of future diagnostics across a range of menstrual care products.

Digital connectivity, as advocated by P2C, will be critical to integration and scaling. Connectivity supported through the Moxie dispenser will enable verified information on the best care practices, along with implementation of digital health services. It also means  people are assured of receiving critical healthcare products.

Recent reports from McKinsey & CompanyClosing the data gap in women’s health (2023) and Closing the Women’s Health Gap: A $1 Trillion Opportunity to Improve Lives and Economies (2024) – highlight the potential impact of improving the quality of life for women and girls.

Today, the technologies exist to address these challenges while enabling us to address affordability and access. Yet we must do so in the correct manner. For example, the lack of systemised governance and limited individual empowerment have extended to AI deployment in health contexts where the underlying datasets and models are not available for interrogation and validation. Not only are proper scientific and engineering foundations necessary for improved outcomes, but the deployment of algorithms without transparency and accountability can perpetuate bias and discrimination, amplifying existing health disparities.

At Elle, we are addressing this by making all our AI artifacts, including models and datasets, available as benchmarks. This open-source and open-science approach is fundamental to improve outcomes for advancing diagnostics, treatments, and cures.

In implementing a holistic, integrated solution for women’s health in low-resource settings, we are seizing the challenges in Sub-Saharan Africa as an opportunity for solutions that are global exemplars.

It’s a collective effort, and I encourage academia, industry, and government to realise the challenges and opportunities before us. I urge all of you to join Elle in advancing P2C’s efforts to drive meaningful connectivity and digital transformation in communities across the globe.

ITU – the UN agency for digital technologies – announced the launch of P2C in September 2021, aiming to mobilize commitments from governments, companies and other organizations to foster meaningful connectivity and sustainable digital transformation in communities across the globe. To date, the initiative has mobilized USD 50.96 billion worth of pledges representing expertise, resources, and investment for projects to reach the world’s hardest-to-connect communities, with the aim of reaching USD 100 billion by the end of 2026.

You may read more about Elle’s pledges here, the ITU Partner2Connect Digital Coalition here, and The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS Process) Forum here

 

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