The Commonwealth Digital Health Awards (CWDHA) was founded by Prof. Vajira  H.W. Dissanayake in 2016 as the signature event of the Commonwealth Digital Health Initiative which was the flagship project of his Presidency of the Commonwealth Medical Association from 2016 to 2019. The CWDHA was first held in October 2016 alongside the 24th Triennial Conference of the Commonwealth Medical Association in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The 2^nd and 3^rd editions of the CWDHA were held in October 2017 and in October 2018 while the 4^th edition, which was to be held in Geneva in May 2020, was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and held as a virtual event in November 2020.

The Commonwealth Centre for Digital Health (CWCDH), which was launched during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in London in April 2018, took over its management following the first two editions and was able to expand the event to reach a global audience supported by many partners.

We believe that health does not exist in isolation but is connected with many other fields including education, finance, environment, and nutrition. The concept of social determinants of health is based on this very same idea emphasizing more the importance of considering digital health as an ecosystem where technologies representing education, finance, environment, and nutrition complements health technologies in uplifting health and wellbeing of the people.

Therefore, as with the 4^th edition, the 5^th edition of the CWDHA will also seek to bring to the forefront innovations related to social determinants of health. This would mean that applicants can pitch their innovations to a wider audience beyond the health and technology domain.

The CWDHA aims to build a valuable digital products pipeline to improve the health and wellbeing of billions, including but not limited to those with few resources. In our experience, many digital innovators with excellent solutions cannot take the next step and become entrepreneurs. They lack even minimal resources and expertise to build a successful start-up.

We believe in sustainable entrepreneurship where business values and social values progress hand in hand. Towards this end, we are creating an ecosystem where commercial and mission-led development partners, governments, investors, researchers, and digital health experts complement each other’s skills to rapidly and efficiently develop and scale solutions in some of highest need categories. The awards are the nucleus of this ecosystem.

The key objectives of the CWDHA are:

• To provide a platform for digital entrepreneurs, innovators and researchers from around the world to showcase their products and solutions.
• To support high potential digital innovations, achieve high impact in Commonwealth countries and in the developing contexts by means of recognition, investment mentorship and scaling.
• To create a marketplace for development partners, funding agencies, investors, governments and state institutions, and industry partners.
• To facilitate networking between digital innovators, investors, researchers and development partners thus enabling a ‘connected health ecosystem’.
• To promote sharing of digital technologies and ideas as global goods.

The CWDHA attracts submissions from all continents of the world from both Commonwealth and non Commonwealth countries. As with previous years, we will utilize multiple channels and networks to publicize the call for applications across the globe including but not limited to those listed below:

The CWCDH will be organizing a series of webinars as a build-up to the Digital Health Awards in November. Each webinar will be contributed to by an eminent personality in digital health field and will feature selected past winners. The event will be given wide publicity through our networks and will therefore attract many participants including academics, researchers, students, representatives of ministries of health, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, etc., and representatives from the industry. The schedule for the webinar series will be as follows.