Globally, four billion people lack access to basic health services and with current population growth there will be an estimated 18 million shortfall in health workers by 2030. This shortage of health workers has and will continue to have a severe impact on children and young people, especially in low- and middle-income countries. 

There is a clear need to make healthcare more accessible and digital technology can play an important role in achieving this. However, despite digital health solutions facing exponential growth in recent years, the majority of the solutions are not adopted to specific regions or languages, meaning the quality of health information and advice is poor, and the capacity gap only continues to increase. 

Fondation Botnar is supporting Ada Health, a health tech company that has developed an intelligent symptom-assessment app available for free to help people understand, manage and get care for their symptoms. The support from the foundation has allowed Ada to integrate Swahili and Romanian into its growing list of available languages. The localized versions of Ada’s consumer app are being deployed in East Africa and Romania, focusing on families and young people in areas with limited access to healthcare. Within the first three years, the initiative is projected to reach two million people within both regions aligning with Ada’s mission to accelerate universal health care coverage and improve healthcare delivery for those who need it most. 

Ada’s artificial intelligence technology has been trained over the past nine years using real-world medical cases and with insights from hundreds of expert doctors, scientists, and researchers. Ada is the world’s most popular symptom assessment app used by millions of people, consistently highly rated.