Malaria Consortium endorses the Principles for Digital Development

Malaria Consortium is pleased to announce its endorsement of the Principles for Digital Development. This set of nine guidelines, designed by an international working group, promotes best practice in international development digital activities.

The nine guidelines, all of which Malaria Consortium seeks to build into its digital work, are:

• Design with the user
• Understand the existing ecosystem
• Design for scale
• Build for sustainability
• Be data driven
• Use open standards, open data, open source, and open innovation
• Reuse and improve
• Address privacy and security
• Be collaborative

As a part of its commitment to these principles, Malaria Consortium will engage in external forums such as the Digital Principles Forum, the Health Data Collaborative, Digital Solutions for Malaria Elimination Community of Practice and others, to ensure the continued alignment of its strategies with the wider digital development community.

The Principles for Digital Development interact with a new set of guidelines around digital investment, which were launched today at the World Health Summit in Berlin. The Digital Principles for Investment aim to support donors as they seek to align their investments with digital health strategies around the world.

Malaria Consortium’s digital health work focuses on providing technical advice to governments on the implementation of digital health strategies. The organisation conducts operational research to build the evidence base for digital health development. Notable examples of this work have included supporting governments with the development of malaria and community health information systems in Cambodia, Mozambique and Myanmar, as well as operational research on SMS, Android and feature phone applications to improve community-based primary health care in Mozambique, Nigeria and Uganda.