Introduction
The Democratic Republic of Congo took a major step forward in the digital transformation of its health system in 2025. With support from the Gates Foundation through the Umbrella Fund, a national effort was launched to lay the foundation for a centralized health geo-registry. This collaborative initiative was led by the National Agency for Clinical and Digital Health Engineering (ANICNS), the government institution mandated to coordinate and advance the country’s digital health agenda. Technical coordination was provided by Bluesquare, with funding from the Umbrella Fund, and quality oversight by Dev-Afrique. Together, the partners developed a system architecture framework for ANICNS’s centralized geo-registry, designed to serve as a long-term national asset for the health sector.
Why a National Health Geo-Registry?
Like many large and complex countries, the DRC had no shortage of health data. The challenge was that this data was fragmented.
Geographic identifiers were not harmonised across programmes. The same health facility could appear under different names or codes in different systems. Administrative and health boundaries were defined inconsistently. As a result, real-time, centralized visibility of the health system at a national scale remained difficult to achieve.
The consequence was that the people responsible for planning health services, managing disease outbreaks, and allocating resources were often working with incomplete or inconsistent geographic information. Closing this gap was exactly what the national health geo-registry was designed to do.
The vision was a centralised, interoperable platform that would serve as the official reference for all geospatial data within the DRC’s health system, covering the location of every health facility and infrastructure, standardised administrative and health boundaries, demographic layers, and connectivity with existing systems like DHIS2 via international standards such as HL7 FHIR and OGC WMS/WFS.
What was Achieved
Since the project launched in July 2025, Bluesquare moved quickly to lay the technical and institutional groundwork.
Kick-off and planning (July 2025). A launch meeting in Kinshasa brought together ANICNS, Bluesquare, and Dev-Afrique to align on objectives, expected results, and governance arrangements. A detailed 12-week work plan was validated, with clear responsibilities and deliverables assigned to each partner.
Stakeholder mapping. Eighteen key stakeholders were identified and classified according to their role in the future geo-registry, ranging from national health programmes (PNLP, PRONANUT, PNECHOL-MD) to technical partners (WHO, PATH, CHAI, VillageReach, SANRU) and institutions holding critical geographic data (DSNIS, IGC, INS).
Diagnostic workshop (September 2025). Twenty actors from across the ecosystem gathered in Kinshasa for a three-day participatory diagnostic. The findings confirmed what many had suspected: the DRC’s geospatial ecosystem was rich but heavily fragmented and poorly harmonised. The workshop mapped more than 20 digital tools and platforms in use for geospatial health data and, through a structured evaluation against criteria including interoperability, cost, accessibility, adoption, and sustainability, narrowed the field to nine priority tools, including DHIS2, QGIS, IASO, ODK/KoboToolbox, Gestion PEV, GTS Tracker, GRID3 Data Hub, and OpenStreetMap.
The resulting SWOT analysis from the workshop provided a candid picture. Strong political will, the institutional mandate of ANICNS, and a robust set of existing tools provided a solid foundation. At the same time, structural weaknesses such as fragmented databases, the absence of harmonised standards, limited local geomatics expertise, and dependence on external financing needed to be addressed directly. Opportunities were equally evident, including the growing demand for reliable data among decision-makers and donors, and the potential of cloud computing and AI for predictive analysis. Risks such as cybersecurity and data sovereignty concerns, institutional overlaps, and the perennial challenge of staff turnover underscored the importance of local ownership.
Architectural framework (October–November 2025). Drawing on the diagnostic workshop and Bluesquare’s technical analysis, a draft architectural framework was developed and refined through iterative review with ANICNS. The document was structured around seven layers: institutional governance, functional services, technical infrastructure, data, interoperability and integration, security, and sustainability. It served both as a synthesis of the diagnostic phase and as an initial roadmap toward a national integrated geospatial platform.
How the Partnership Worked
ANICNS provided institutional leadership, ensuring ownership of the future registry and alignment with national digital health priorities. Bluesquare led technical coordination, managed the work plan, and consolidated deliverables. Dev-Afrique exercised quality assurance and oversight, ensuring alignment with stakeholder-defined requirements and global standards, while also contributing directly to technical inputs that went beyond typical fund administration.
This clear division of responsibilities, supported by regular coordination mechanisms, enabled the project to maintain momentum and absorb disruptions.
What Came Next
The immediate priority following the reporting period was a validation workshop, held during the week of 24 November. During this session, the architectural framework was reviewed and endorsed by the broader stakeholder community, after which the architectural report was updated to reflect the final inputs.
This project marked the first major milestone in deploying the national geo-registry. ANICNS, together with Dev-Afrique, will work on defining the technical specifications and implementation calendar for 2026 as the next step.
A Strategic Milestone
The development of a national health geo-registry in the DRC was a strategic investment in the country’s capacity for data-driven health governance, supporting universal health coverage, epidemic surveillance, resource planning, and emergency response. When implemented, the national geo-registry will advance the DRC’s digital sovereignty and the government’s ability to manage its own health data infrastructure on its own terms.
The foundation was laid carefully. The momentum was real. And the growing interest from stakeholders across the ecosystem, who increasingly came to see the geo-registry as a tool they wanted and needed, was perhaps the most encouraging signal of all.
