Earlier this month in October (13th to 15th), our team joined hundreds of innovators, policymakers, and investors at the Africa HealthTech Summit 2025 in Kigali – a gathering that captured the energy of Africa’s fast-evolving digital health ecosystem.
Representing DPE, our Co-Founder and CTO, Dennis Maorwe, spoke on the panel “From Startup to Scale: Innovations Transforming Health Systems” under the Health Innovation and Entrepreneurship track, hosted by HealthTech Hub Africa (HTHA) and Villgro Africa.
The discussion centered on what it truly takes to scale health innovations across Africa. For DPE, the answer isn’t just more technology – it’s deeper context.
During the session, a challenging question was posed to Dennis:
“How do you measure behavioral change and the long-term impact of your campaigns? Can your platform be linked to diagnostics centers and vaccination services?”
Dennis’s response grounded the audience in the realities of community health work:
“One of the first ways that we learned what the impact of our solution was wasn’t through traditional ROI modeling,” he explained.
“It was when a county health official told us they had stockouts in health centres – because we had messaged the community to go to the hospital. That was our first proxy indicator.”
That simple observation – people showing up for care – became a powerful reminder that impact in African health systems is often measured in unexpected human ways, not just in dashboards and models.
DPE’s work emphasizes this philosophy: combining behavioral insight, opt-in communication channels, and feedback loops that help communities act on trusted information. Our systems are designed to work even in low-connectivity settings, linking real human insight to health action.
As Dennis added,
“The key to scale isn’t more apps – it’s helping people and health systems capture data they weren’t able to before. Because that’s where the real stickiness lies.”
For DPE, this panel was more than a speaking opportunity – it was a chance to contribute to a growing conversation about how African-led innovation measures what truly matters: impact that moves people to act.
We’re grateful to HealthTech Hub Africa (HTHA), Villgro Africa, and our fellow innovators who continue to shape this dialogue across the continent.
Follow our journey as part of the HTHA 2025 Accelerator Cohort, and stay tuned for our next milestones as we continue building Africa’s trusted AI layer for health engagement.
(Tags: #HTHA2025 #AHTS25 #HealthTechAfrica #DigitalHealth #DPEKenya #VillgroAfrica)
