Overview

Who are we?

Jembi Health Systems (Jembi) is an African-based not-for-profit NGO based in South Africa focusing on the development of eHealth and health Information systems in developing countries.  The idea for Jembi grew out of the Open Architectures and Standards in Information Systems (OASIS) project, funded by the Canadian International Development Research Center (IDRC) and awarded to the South African Medical Research Council (MRC) in 2007.

The NGO was started by Dr Chris Seebregts and Carl Fourie in 2009 and has since grown rapidly to provide infrastructural support for projects and offices in several African countries, including South Africa, Mozambique, Rwanda and Zimbabwe.  Jembi’s Head Office is based in Westlake, Cape Town, South Africa and it has a research laboratory within the School of Computer Science at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in Durban, South Africa.  Project/satellite offices are based in Maputo, Kigali and Harare.

What is our Vision?

“A world in which health systems and information advance global health”

What is our Mission?

“We are an African not-for-profit organization improving global health by developing information systems, growing partnerships and building local capacity, with a focus on developing countries”

What are our Objectives?

Our objectives are tightly based on our values where we:

Aim to be innovative and impactful: being able to be a center of excellence for the advancement of health information systems and solutions.

Aim to be independent and impartial: playing the role of honest brokers with no vested interest and striving for excellence and adoption of best practice in our field.

Aim to respect local capacity and expectations: we invest in the principle of country ownership and development of local capacity to support solutions and provide their own.

Aim to invest in people: by valuing our culture of unity, trust, respect for the individual and aim to build into this as well as into personal capacity development.

Aim to implement and promote good governance: through being responsible stewards of our resources: human, environmental and financial and promoting this in our partners and capacity development sites.

What do we do?

We provide the technical skills, tools and implementation expertise needed to develop and enhance eHealth and health information systems in low resource settings.  We act as honest brokers, develop software, analyze and re-engineer health systems and undertake research into the application of health information systems in developing countries. We promote the use of open architectures and standards in information systems and partner with governments, local and international NGOs and consortia to facilitate knowledge sharing, project work and coordination.

Jembi receives funding from the international donor community and is currently supported by grants and contracts from the International Development Research Center (IDRC), the Rockefeller Foundation, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS relief (PEPFAR).  Jembi also works in partnership with other African NGOs and directly under contract.