Health Electrification and Telecommunications Alliance works with AWS to electrify health facilities in sub-Saharan Africa
The Health Electrification and Telecommunications Alliance (HETA) is Power Africa’s initiative for health facility electrification and digital connectivity in sub-Saharan Africa. Power Africa is part of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and harnesses the collective resources of public and private sectors to expand electricity in sub-Saharan Africa. Power Africa’s mission is to increase access to reliable, renewable energy and digital connection across health facilities in the region over the next four years to promote the use of renewable energy across country-level health systems.
These improvements are vital for supporting equitable access to care for people across sub-Saharan Africa. The initiative targets 40 countries, and Guinea, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eswatini, Mozambique, and Tanzania have begun implementation. As a global development alliance, HETA is a partnership in which the U.S. government and the private sector combine resources, expertise, and capabilities to support country health systems to adopt renewable energy solutions, which improve access to health services.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) convenes partners to collaboratively design market-based solutions that meet facilities and communities’ needs while making it easier and less costly to invest in the systems that power access to high-quality healthcare and productive uses of energy. This post describes how AWS and HETA bring together governments, donors, technology providers, and health organizations to develop sustainable business models that can electrify and digitally connect healthcare infrastructure.
The challenge
An estimated 100,000 health facilities in sub-Saharan Africa lack reliable access to the electricity and digital connectivity they need to equitably serve their communities. Without these services, facilities can’t keep the lights on for nighttime births or emergency surgeries, run equipment that keeps vaccines viable, or modernize their communication and records management systems.
This creates gaps in service delivery, limits access to life-saving healthcare, and diminishes health systems’ resilience to climate change and other threats. Another key challenge is monitoring and maintaining distributed energy and connectivity installations over time to ensure reliable operation. Many facilities are in remote locations with limited communications and oversight. Preventative maintenance is difficult and problems are often not detected until systems have failed, disrupting critical health services.
How HETA works
HETA works with diverse partners to design solutions that meet the need for power and digital connectivity, extend the benefits of energy access to nearby communities, and accelerate progress toward greater resilience and decarbonization of the health sector. HETA can support a wide range of health facilities—from rural, off-grid clinics to diagnostic laboratories and facilities providing temperature-controlled storage of vaccines and other health commodities. HETA selects facilities in partnership with the host country government, USAID, and private sector partners.
The solution
AWS is collaborating with HETA to develop a cloud-based solution for real-time monitoring, analytics, predictive maintenance of energy and connectivity infrastructure. AWS offers a versatile, secure, and cost-effective platform to ingest, process, and visualize multiple data streams from dispersed network endpoints through the use of dashboards. Sensor data from solar panels, batteries, generators, routers, and other endpoint devices is continuously collected and streamed to the AWS Cloud. Dashboards provide real-time visibility into system health and performance, with alerts for outages or degradation. Remote control capabilities can automate or trigger preventative actions like battery charging.
The first phase focuses on developing a common monitoring and analytics platform that ingests data streams from solar and battery installations at community health facilities across Kenya as a proof of concept. The AWS architecture aggregates three critical types of time-series data:
- Internet of Things (IoT) metrics from remote solar and battery controllers, including voltage, current, and temperature.
- System health and fault indicators from installed hardware sensors.
- Energy utilization data from smart meters measuring facility and community consumption.
Figure 1. High-level design illustrates the connectivity of a solar farm in sub-Saharan countries to the AWS Cloud via modems utilizing multiple SIM cards.
The raw data undergoes validation and transformation and is then put into AWS analytics services such as Amazon Timestream, Amazon Managed Grafana, and Amazon SageMaker. Trained ML models detect usage patterns and anomalies, predict component degradation, and customize optimal battery charging and load dispatch behavior per site. Amazon Managed Grafana dashboards present integrated facility-level and aggregate views of system status, with the ability to drill down into specific components or sites.
In the second phase, connectivity data from mobile and Wi-Fi networks will be incorporated to correlate infrastructure status with health outcomes. Expanding deployments across sub-Saharan Africa will validate the reusability of the architecture and analytics models. Over time, the goal is to automate monitoring and maintenance tasks and standardize the stack for rapid replication by technology partners.
Applying machine learning (ML) to operational history data enables models to detect early signs of component failure and initiate proactive maintenance. This minimizes downtime and disruption to health services. Detailed utilization metrics and predictive analytics optimize system sizing and operations to reduce long-term costs. Excess solar capacity can power productive use cases like water pumping and refrigeration to generate additional revenue.
Figure 2. Screenshot of a dashboard tracking real-time sensor data from solar panel grids in sub-Saharan Africa. The dashboard is tracking voltage, temperature, and currents of solar panels.
The use of the AWS Cloud transforms the pace and scale at which international development works. Through our approach we are able to deliver a cost-effective solution that supports the monitoring of thousands of health facilities (both urban and rural settings) across sub-Saharan Africa and facilities simplifying replication.
Conclusion
HETA aims to sustainably scale its mission using the versatility of AWS. The cloud-based approach cost-effectively processes vast data streams from thousands of remote sites to optimize uptime and services. The insights produced will demonstrate the value proposition to donors and governments, as well as ensure the long-term viability of electricity and connectivity investments for underserved health facilities. Collaborating with AWS unlocks innovation in model sustainability and telecom co-investments over five years that can benefit more than 20 million people through health infrastructure upgrades.
