Meet Jonia Bwakea
When Jonia Bwakea received an email inviting her to take part in the Day in the Life profile series, her first reaction was to walk into her Country Director's office to ask whether it was genuine. “I thought it might be a phishing email,” she laughs.

That modesty is perhaps fitting for someone who is more comfortable talking about the impact of digital health than her own achievements.

Jonia is Programme Manager with PharmAccess in Zanzibar, where she works alongside the Ministry of Health and other partners to develop and implement digital solutions that support Zanzibar’s journey towards universal health coverage. Her work spans maternal and child health, management of chronic diseases, behavioural change communication, and the use of digital solutions to strengthen health financing systems, including health insurance.

Like many people working in digital health, Jonia did not start out in technology. After graduating with a sociology degree, she worked with coffee farming communities in northern Tanzania where she saw first hand how community health insurance enabled families to access the health services they badly needed. The positive impact this programme was having on poor, rural communities convinced Jonia that she wanted to become part of the solution. So, when an opportunity arose in 2015 to join PharmAccess and support the roll out of digital health initiatives, she seized this.

As a Project Officer, Jonia was soon supporting the adoption of digital health solutions, such as MomCare, a programme that uses mobile technology to monitor risks and send personalised health information to expectant mothers, and support healthcare providers to deliver good quality care. After working on MomCare for almost three years in mainland Tanzania – where it has helped to transform the lives of more than 26,000 women – Jonia played a key role in introducing the programme in Zanzibar, drawing on the lessons learned to date.

Explaining her career journey, Jonia says,

People often assume digital health is only for software engineers or data scientists, but I soon realised I could make an important contribution by understanding how digital solutions work to improve people’s access t care.

A Day in the Life
No two days look the same for Jonia. As Programme Manager, she spends much of her time coordinating projects, liaising with government partners, and bringing together stakeholders, including policymakers, health workers, software developers and data analysts, and international development partners. Her busy days are filled with meetings to review progress, troubleshoot challenges and plan the next phase of the work. She also makes frequent visits to health facilities to see first hand how the new digital solutions are working in
practice, and to talk through the many challenges health workers and their clients continue to face.

“My role is really about prioritizing”, says Jonia, “I am constantly looking across the different projects we manage and deciding what needs my attention most on any given day.”

In the long term, it is the government who will be in the driving seat, and Jonia cannot stress enough the importance of ensuring that digital pilots designed with support from
PharmAccess are fully aligned with national policies and systems. “Building trust with health system partners, strengthening their capacities, and helping sometimes sceptical stakeholders see the value of new approaches, are essential parts of my role and require time and energy.”

Helping transform a promising idea into a solution that government can own and sustain is what drives Jonia. A good illustration of this approach is Zanzibar’s Kadi ya Matibabu card (Swahili for Medical Treatment Card). What began as a small proof of concept in 2020 has since grown into the government’s national digital health identity system. Built using the openIMIS software, it provides every patient with a unique identifier that links them to their health records and allows patient data to be shared across platforms, supporting Zanzibar’s transition to a sustainable digital health ecosystem.

The journey, however, was far from straightforward. “There were times when I felt very discouraged,” Jonia remembers. “Some of our partners couldn’t yet see the value of what we were trying to achieve. Innovation often challenges established norms and disrupts existing ways of working, and not everyone will immediately see the bigger picture or the long-term impact.” For Jonia, meaningful transformation requires persistence. Together with her team, she continued working closely with the Ministry of Health to guide the development of the project, patiently building support among stakeholders for the new system.

And in 2025, those efforts were recognised when Zanzibar’s former Minister of Health and the Director of PharmAccess, Zanzibar Dr. Faiza Abbas accepted the 2025 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Prize in the e-Health category on behalf of the project.Reflecting on this journey, Jonia says,

I find it incredibly rewarding to see these innovations not only delivering measurable results, but also being institutionalized within government systems, embedded in the national health infrastructure, and sustained through local leadership, resources, and ownership. That, to me, is thetrue measure of lasting impact.

Being a Woman in Digital Health
Reflecting on her arrival on the island of Zanzibar, Jonia says, “As a woman, and coming from mainland Tanzania, I faced some cultural barriers. This is still a field that is dominated by computer scientists, and most of them are men.”
One early conversation helped to boost her confidence. During a networking event for women at the Global Digital Health Forum in Nairobi, another participant offered somesimple but powerful advice: make sure your manager knows about your achievements as well as your ambitions.

Inspired by that conversation, Jonia spoke up during her next performance review about her achievements and how she wanted to grow as a leader. Her manager – also a woman – has encouraged her leadership aspirations and helped create opportunities for greater responsibility. “People underestimate the power of women meeting and talking,” Jonia reflects. “For me, this was quite impactful and it helped me to grow.”

This experience reinforced her belief that professional networks, mentorship, and supportive management practices can make an enormous difference in helping young women build
their careers.

Advising others…
Jonia’s advice to young women considering a career in digital health is reassuringly simple.
“You don’t have to be the technical expert,” she says. “You need to understand the problem you are trying to solve, believe in the solution and have the confidence to advocate for it.”

She is equally clear about the importance of good leaders and mentors. Looking back, Jonia believes that the encouragement, guidance and confidence they gave her were instrumental in shaping her own career. “I cannot overstate the invaluable role my mentors – both within and outside my organisation – have played in my professional journey,” she says.

For Jonia, digital health has never been about technology for its own sake. It is about finding practical ways to improve people’s lives and ensuring that the solutions developed today continue to strengthen health systems for years to come.