  Inefficient healthcare is a major concern among many African nations and can
be mitigated by building world-class infrastructure connecting different
medical facilities for collaboration and resource sharing. Such infrastructure
should support collection and exchange of medical data for the purpose of
accessing expertise not available locally. It should be equipped with modern
technologies of the fourth industrial revolution, providing decision support to
doctors thereby enabling African nations leapfrog from poorly equipped to
medically prepared. Sadly, world-class healthcare infrastructure are a missing
piece in the African public health ecosystem. Medical facilities are either
non-existent or prohibitively expensive when they exist. Federated cloud
computing can provide a solution to this challenge. Being a model that allows
collaboration between multiple Cloud service providers through resources
pooling; it allows for the execution of tasks on computing resources flexibly
and cost efficiently. This paper aims to connect unconnected medical facilities
in Africa by proposing a Cloud federation for healthcare using cooperative and
competitive collaboration models. Simulations were carried out to test the
efficacy of these models using five different workload allocation schemes:
First-Fit-Descending (FFD), Best-Fit-Descending (BFD), Binary-Search-Best-Fit
(BSBF); Genetic Algorithm meta-heuristic and Stable Roommate Allocation
economic model for both light and heavy workloads. Results of simulations
revealed that the cooperative model resulted in lower delays but higher
resource utilisation; while the competitive provided faster service delivery
and better quality of service. BSBF and BFD resulted in the best resources
utilisation and energy conservation. Finally, deployment considerations and
potential business models for federated Cloud for African healthcare were
presented.
