The members of the Global Digital Justice Forum (GDJF) submitted their response to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recently released draft Global Strategy on Digital Health (GSDH), 2028–2033, which reflects its vision for the next stage of digital transformation. Over the last 5+ years since the last strategy was released, the global digital health landscape has acquired a few key traits, and our submission was rooted in accounting for these significant shifts.

First, the emergence of language-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) models and compute-heavy statistical techniques in a market economy has complicated the march towards a universal and enforceable right to health. Though these tools may pose possible benefits to certain public health goals, their development and deployment have been led by a handful of private companies located, primarily, in the Global North. This gatekeeping forces most of the world to be dependent on a few key actors, while also diluting the ability of individuals and local communities to hold them accountable to their public health responsibilities.

Second, the fragmentation of the global political and economic order has stalled meaningful progress on matters of digital taxation, data localization, technology transfers, and other forms of cross-border benefit sharing. A lack of multilateral alignment on matters of global public health has also centred concerns of unequal value distribution, reflected best in debates arising within the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) negotiations. If the current gaps in redistributing ‘digital dividends’ remain, the historical pattern of one-way value capture in healthcare risks continuing unabated.

With this context, we submitted that the WHO must explicitly include a new strategic principle in GSDH — Advancing Shared Public Value in Digital Health Futures — and put forth four actions for it to prioritize under this principle.

• Building public control and accountability over digital health assets to encourage socially beneficial innovation, through financing, governance, and mitigation
• Promoting decentralization as core to resilient Digital Public Infrastructure (DPIs) and health information systems
• Recognising market regulation of digital health Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) as a non-negotiable for equity
• Underscoring empowerment of frontline health workers as core to effective digital transformation

Read the full submission here.

The Forum would like to express its gratitude to Meg Davis (University of Warwick) for her support in making this submission.