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Improving Rural Equitable Access to Primary Care Through Tele-Health in Togo

Picture Credit: Koffi Benjamin Atoemne

Project Description

Togo faces persistent gaps in health care, with rural populations being particularly underserved. There are only about 8 physicians per 100,000 population, far below the global average, and most of them are concentrated in urban centres (World Bank 2023). Beyond these clinical shortages, financial barriers persist: fewer than 10% of the population has access to a health insurance, meaning that out-of-pocket costs deter many patients from seeking timely care and that health-related costs can push households into more severe poverty.  

Telemedicine platforms offering remote consultations online or via telephone have been championed as one of the solutions to such shortcomings in healthcare capacity and care (Cobb et al. 2025; Chauhan et al. 2025). They allow access to general practitioners and specialised physicians from anywhere, thus reducing transport and opportunity costs and improving access to medical care (Lagarde et al. 2024). However, academic work on telemedicine has to date mostly focused on high-income regions, not taking into account the unique constraints on electricity usage and internet connectivity faced by telemedicine providers in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The objective of this project is to rigorously evaluate an integrated digital platform designed to make access to primary healthcare faster, more reliable, and better connected in underserved rural communities in Togo. For this, we partner with Kondjigbalè, an African digital health platform that aims to simplify life for patients and healthcare professionals. The platform has been effectively offering services in Lomé, but not yet in poor rural areas of the country, which requires adapting the system to the needs, skills and infrastructure of poor households. This project aims to generate results that will help to improve health care especially for vulnerable populations including children under five, pregnant women and mothers, elderly and chronically ill people, refugees and displaced people at the border to Burkina Faso, and people living in (extreme) poverty.

Collaborators:

  • Prof. Michael Grimm & Laura Stock (University of Passau)

  • Yvon Koudam  (CEO & Co-founder, Kondgibalè)

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