Seven years growing up in open-source digital health
From junior developer to team lead on the open-source health infrastructure behind MomConnect and OpenHIM, now running in national exchanges across multiple countries.
The problem
South Africa needed to reach pregnant women and new mothers directly, at national scale, with maternal health information and support, regardless of which clinic or system held their record. Across Africa, health systems needed open-source infrastructure to connect records that had never been designed to talk to each other.
What I did
I worked through every level of the engineering career path at Jembi:
- Developer to mid-level (2013–2017): moved from PHP into JavaScript and Node.js, took ownership of smaller projects end to end, and started contributing to architecture discussions.
- Senior developer (2017–2019): took full solution ownership, delivering complete implementations for international clients.
- Team lead (2019–2020): led 2–3 developers across 3–4 concurrent international projects, owning requirements, solution design and stakeholder engagement.
Key products included MomConnect (the South African Department of Health’s maternal health platform), OpenHIM core, the OpenHIM Mapping Mediator, Instant OpenHIE, and FHIR, DHIS2 and REDCap implementations.
How I showed up
The most lasting work from these years wasn’t code. I ran technical training sessions in Tanzania and Ethiopia to build in-country engineering capacity, so health teams could run and extend their own systems. Learning to lead happened here too, through managing requirements and stakeholders across several countries at once.
Outcome
MomConnect reached hundreds of thousands of registered mothers. OpenHIM, which I contributed to as a core developer, is now deployed in national health exchanges across multiple countries.