How the HCE Coalition’s Campaign Digitization Workgroup is connecting global health experts to reduce duplication, share innovations, and improve campaign outcomes.
In our increasingly technology-driven world, ministries of health are turning to digital tools and solutions to better plan, coordinate, and sometimes integrate health campaigns.
Digitization of the myriad processes underpinning campaigns—microplanning, managing supply chain, supervising and paying health workers, and monitoring coverage—can be beneficial to campaign success.
The ever-increasing number of innovative digital tools in the marketplace, however, can overwhelm those whose job it is to decide if, when, and how to use them. Additionally, lack of coordination among health programs and systems increases the risk of duplication and reinvention of solutions that already exist.
The Health Campaign Effectiveness Coalition sought to remedy this problem starting in 2022 by establishing the Campaign Digitization Workgroup (CDWG) to connect people across health programs with digital health experts around a common cause: using digital tools to enhance campaign effectiveness without duplicating applications and efforts.
Hosted by the HCE Coalition Program Office, and co-chaired by a steering committee of colleagues from Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), UNICEF, and the World Health Organization’s Regional Office for Africa (WHO AFRO), the CDWG has become a robust community for campaign digitization problem-solving and knowledge sharing. Members span multilateral institutions, implementing partners, funders, and private sector innovators.
The CDWG brings people across countries and sectors together to share what they’re learning from campaign digitization initiatives, offer interdisciplinary feedback on emerging resources and ideas, and help get finalized tools and insights into the hands of the people who can use them. By connecting efforts that have often operated in silos, the group helps advance country-led, standards-based digitization aligned with national health strategies and, where possible, accelerate the adoption and use of these resources. According to one CDWG member, “It is a critical coordination platform at a time when ministries of health are increasingly prioritizing integrated, digitally enabled campaigns while navigating constrained financing.”
The workgroup’s key achievement to-date has been contributions to high profile campaign digitization guidance documents:
Integrated Digitization of Health Campaigns Toolkit (World Health Organization Regional Office for Africa (WHO AFRO), UNICEF & Clinton Health Access Initiative, 2025) – a collection of complementary technical and operational documents designed to support the integrated digitization of health campaigns, in which two or more digital health solutions are partially or fully connected.
Digital Tool Selection Guidebook for Health Campaigns (UNICEF, CHAI & WHO AFRO, 2025), a complementary document to the toolkit above highlights use cases for digitization across all phases of the campaign life cycle, compares digital tools and their different functionalities, and offers practical guidance on how digital solutions can enhance campaign effectiveness and align with broader health system strengthening goals.
Going forward, the workgroup members have expressed interest in focusing on data sharing and reuse across campaigns, improving data use during campaigns, lifecycle planning for digitization, adapting to reduced funding, and the thoughtful use of artificial intelligence. The workgroup has also emphasized that campaign digitization should be integrated into broader health systems, rather than treated as a parallel effort, which underscores the need for broadening CDWG participation. The workgroup is eager to have more participation from ministries of health and frontline implementers and is looking for new members with expertise in health economics, AI, interoperability, and data governance.
In the current landscape of reduced global health funding and increased need for collaboration, integration, and efficiency, the CDWG remains a trusted platform for campaign digitization partners to coordinate efforts toward a common goal of improved health campaign effectiveness. As one member put it, “Continued convening [of the CDWG] is essential to reduce fragmentation, align partner investments, and promote reuse of digital toolkits that have been developed. The CDWG is well positioned to provide technical coherence.”
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