Digital Health in the Global South: Coordination Constraints and the Capital Allocation Problem

Olaniyi Evans

Hequation Review, 2026, vol. 3, issue 2, 23-29

Abstract: Emerging-market digital health is widely treated as capital-starved. It is not. The deeper problem is coordination. Private capital flows to payment-linked consumer applications while the non-rival public goods that make health data valuable, namely identity, interoperability standards, and exchange backbones, remain unfunded. Drawing on WHO, GSMA, OECD, Partech, and Smart Africa data through early 2026, this article frames the sector as a coordination failure across three regions and proposes a constraint-regime typology that links each market's binding bottleneck to the capital structure that fits it. The central risk is misreading the regime, not the addressable market.

Keywords: digital health; interoperability; coordination failure; venture capital; emerging markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G24 I11 I18 O25 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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