Background for Community Meeting in Cameroon

The aim of the openIMIS Community Meeting is to strengthen the community and alliances for technical enhancement and expanded implementation of the Digital Public Good openIMIS, which supports partner countries in their efforts towards Universal Health Coverage (UHC) and Universal Social Protection (USP). The meeting will bring together users, implementers and developers of openIMIS from the global community to take stock of latest developments and achievements and plan future activities around openIMIS and its expanded functionalities following the merger with CORE-MIS, a digital solution developed by the World Bank.

The knowledge hubs, Asian eHealth Information Network and Kenya Health Informatics Association, provide support to the community at various levels in order to promote the use of openIMIS, creation and dissemination of knowledge around openIMIS, as well as for capacity development. Both hubs are represented during the Community Meeting and will actively contribute to the knowledge sharing and capacity building character of the event.

The openIMIS Community Meeting in Yaoundé is the first in-person meeting of the bigger community since 2019, after the COVID-19 pandemic, and the first chance for community members to directly interact with the CORE-MIS team after the recent merger (12/2022).

Cameroon has been chosen as location for the Community Meeting for its multiple implementations of openIMIS by various scheme operators (HIV fee elimination scheme, maternal health voucher scheme, health voucher scheme for refugees) under the Ministry of Public Health.
BMZ and SDC have been supporting the scaling-up and improved interoperability of schemes through the Catalytic Implementation Fund (support of feasibility study and implementation between 2021-2023). With the expanded functionality into other social protection use cases beyond health, there is much interest in linking openIMIS (and integrated CORE-MIS elements) with other digital systems being used for aggregated data e.g. Performance Based Financing (PBF) supported by the World Bank and the planned social registry by the Cameroon Ministry of Social Affairs (MINAS).