Sovereign Health Infrastructure for Burkina Faso
A national digital health ecosystem designed for African realities — offline-first, infrastructure-aware, and sovereign by design.
Sankofa — return, restore, build forward.
Burkina Faso Needs More Than Digitized Records
Rolling blackouts. No connectivity. Paper-bound corridors. 800+ daily patients at Bobo-Dioulasso with no digital infrastructure. A conventional cloud-dependent EMR here is a liability, not an asset.
Infrastructure Gap
Grid Failures & Zero Connectivity
Rolling municipal blackouts prevent cloud-dependent Western EHRs from functioning. Epic and Cerner go dark when the power goes out. Burkina Faso's patients cannot.
Fragmented Care
Paper Records & Data Silos
65% of Burkina Faso's 23 million people live in rural or semi-urban areas. Patients travel 50+ km for tertiary care. WhatsApp is the telemedicine platform. Clinical data never follows the patient.
Sovereignty Risk
Foreign Dependency & Data Exposure
Donor-funded NGO systems are project-specific, underfunded post-launch, and route national health data through foreign servers. Burkina Faso deserves sovereign control of its citizens' health records.
The Sankofa Platform
Not an EMR. A Healthcare Operating Platform.
Sankofa integrates clinical workflows, telemedicine, diagnostics, pharmacy, public health surveillance, and infrastructure intelligence into a single sovereign platform — designed to thrive where Western competitors literally go dark.
Facility Operations System
Unlike conventional EHRs, Sankofa monitors the infrastructure that sustains clinical operations in real time: solar charge, battery reserves, generator fuel, water supply, and Starlink connectivity — enabling proactive decisions that protect patient outcomes before a crisis occurs.
Core Capabilities
Clinical Operations
EHR, triage, physician documentation, discharge
Telemedicine
Tyto kiosks, specialist access, emergency escalation
Diagnostics
Abbott i-STAT point-of-care integration via HL7/MLLP
Pharmacy & Supply Chain
inventory, stock alerts, procurement visibility
Edge Continuity
offline clinical ops via AWS Outposts, delayed sync
Facility OS (FOS)
solar, battery, water, generator, Starlink telemetry
Public Health Intelligence
malaria surveillance, DHIS2/ENDOS reporting
OpenMRS Foundation
FHIR R4, CIEL concept dictionary, sovereign data
Four-Tier National Deployment
Field-validated across the full spectrum of the Burkinabé healthcare ecosystem — from flagship academic hospital to off-grid rural village.
593 beds · 36 clinical services · 800–1,200 daily visits
The primary referral hub for western Burkina Faso, serving 5M+ people. Academic training hub for the next generation of Burkinabé physicians. Phase 1 deployment — 41-person go-live team.
Equipped clinic & hospital · Ouagadougou · Phase 2
Burkina Faso's equipped clinics and hospitals. Validates continuity of care between flagship and referral environments. FHIR interoperability integration.
MCH focus · Ouagadougou periphery · Phase 3
Frontline outpatient care, maternal and child health workflows, and telemedicine access. Field-validated with the clinic director — a nurse practitioner with pediatric specialization.
Off-grid · Solar + battery · Starlink · AWS edge
Zero grid power. Zero running water on arrival. The hardest deployment — and the one that proves the model. Validated onsite with the village chief, Tomosman G. Samand Naaba.
It became immediately clear that deploying a conventional, cloud-dependent Western EMR here would be an exercise in futility. An enterprise system that goes dark when the municipal grid fails is a liability, not an asset. The people of Burkina Faso do not just need software; they need the lights to stay on.
— Darlene Carter, President & CEO, Carter Consulting Services
Following direct field engagement across all four tiers of the Burkinabé healthcare ecosystem
PROVEN FIRST. FUNDED SECOND.
BDHI finances and proves — at no upfront cost to the Government — that sovereign digital health works in Burkina Faso's real conditions. The Government participates only after the pilot succeeds.
PROVE IT
BDHI finances the full 4-facility pilot — hardware, energy infrastructure, installation, training, and 8 months of in-country support. Budgeted at $1.26M. No software construction required — the platform is already built.
NO UPFRONT COST TO GOVERNMENTFUND ON PROVEN SUCCESS
The Government of Burkina Faso participates only after the pilot meets jointly-defined, independently-verified success criteria — then funds the proven work on capped, pre-defined terms with full Ministry authority over all data-governance decisions.
PAY ON RESULTSSCALE IT NATIONALLY
Once proven, the model supports Burkina Faso's national healthcare-facility initiative. ~$45M would equip facilities determined by a joint needs assessment with the Ministry — turning a successful pilot into sovereign national digital health infrastructure.
NATIONAL SCALEIf Sankofa works at Guéré — offline and off-grid — it works anywhere in Burkina Faso.
CHU de Pala
Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso
Patient-registration installation at a national reference hospital. Immediate Ministry visibility into the platform — no prior infrastructure work required.
Ready for immediate installation
Sedogo Clinic
Léo, Burkina Faso
Fully equipped and solar-resilient clinic — ready for immediate installation. Adds a second Sissili Province data point alongside Guéré.
Solar-resilient · Ready immediately
Marguerita Care Clinic
Saaba, Ouagadougou
Community clinic with a maternal and child health focus. Validates antenatal-care tracking against the WHO 8-visit standard. First structured records for a facility currently on paper.
MCH focus · Antenatal care tracking
Guéré Regional Health Center
Sissili Province, Burkina Faso
Rural, off-grid resilience node. The decisive test of the sovereign, fully offline operating model — solar, battery, atmospheric water generation, AWS Outpost edge compute, Starlink.
Off-grid · The hardest test
Strategic Framework
Diaspora-Led. Sovereign by Design.
BDHI operates within the institutional framework of the April 2026 Memorandum of Understanding between the African Diaspora Development Institute (ADDI) and the Government of Burkina Faso — creating a sovereign pathway for diaspora-led healthcare modernization aligned with national priorities.
African Ownership
Burkina Faso retains absolute sovereignty over all patient data. Zero foreign cloud dependency for PHI.
OpenMRS Foundation
Built on the globally-proven open-source clinical record platform deployed across 70+ countries.
DHIS2 + ENDOS Integration
Direct integration with Burkina Faso's national health information system and patient registry.
Partner With Sankofa
We are actively engaging implementation partners, technology providers, and investors who share BDHI's commitment to sovereign African health infrastructure.
- Technology implementation partners
- Diaspora bond investors ($1.26M Phase 1)
- Global health organizations & development banks
Darlene Carter · darlene.carter@carterconsultingservices.com
+1 (404) 207-2105 · Atlanta, Georgia, USA