Kenya’s rapid national rollout of its electronic Community Health Information System (eCHIS) marked a milestone achievement in community health digitization, with all 107,000 CHWs equipped with digital tools by mid-2024. However, the system encountered intermittent outages by year-end — signs the scaleup outpaced necessary infrastructure planning and readiness for national-scale deployment.

The crisis culminated in late February 2025 when system-related hosting failures triggered persistent downtime nationwide. Although services have been restored in almost all counties, data dashboard challenges are adversely impacting data-driven decision-making and performance management.

The outages severely disrupted Q1 2025 reporting and made it harder for CHWs to deliver care, forcing some to revert to paper-based tools. As one of few partners analyzing complete datasets to drive real-time performance improvements, we raised concerns early on and rapidly mobilized field-informed technical support during the nation-wide outage.

While largely rectified with the support of Living Goods and other partners through a move to a more stable and dedicated government-led data center, the outages reveal a deeper systemic challenge. These novel digital health solutions were scaled without adequate foundational infrastructure, tech governance, and policy-aligned best practices to sustain the systems at scale.

As an organization at the intersection of technology, policy, and implementation, Living Goods has long championed investing in system readiness. We’re now harnessing Kenya’s experience to catalyze the foundational work needed for long-term scaling.

Most significantly, we’re supporting the revitalization of tech governance structures to ensure the government has access to the expertise it needs to sustain eCHIS at scale. This includes the setup of a Technical Working Group and Project Management Unit within the Ministry of Health to coordinate all partners and lead capacity building, strategic planning, and scaling. Looking ahead, we’ll be supporting the government to develop a fit-for-purpose supervision tool and a product roadmap, and to conduct a holistic system assessment.

We’re also leveraging our regional footprint to drive cross-country learning and alignment. At the 2024 Global Digital Health Forum, we facilitated rich government-to-government learning sessions between Kenyan, Burkinabé, and Ugandan representatives – helping seed a new era of peer-driven knowledge sharing for resilient digital health systems.

Living Goods sees the life-saving power of digitized CHWs every day — but we know there are no shortcuts to technology at scale. As we continue supporting governments on their digital health journeys, we’ll translate Kenya’s hard-earned lessons into underlying system readiness, unlocking enduring impact across Kenya, Burkina Faso, Uganda, and beyond.

There’s evidence that eCHIS can make the difference in the field, but there is a need for stronger, coordinated investments in the foundational aspects of digital for it to work sustainably at scale.

– Kanishka Katara, Living Goods’ Chief Digital Health Officer