Digital health literacy in Somali higher education: a public health agenda for navigating health misinformation and generative AI.

Digital health literacy is becoming a core public-health capability as health information is increasingly encountered through search engines, social media, digital services, and generative artificial intelligence (AI). University students are frequent users of these environments, yet digital access does not necessarily confer the ability to evaluate source credibility, recognize misinformation, judge the limits of AI-generated advice, protect personal data, or know when professional guidance is required. This Perspective argues that digital health literacy in Somali higher education should be treated as both an individual competency and an institutional public-health responsibility. Somalia is strengthening digital health and health-information systems, while direct evidence on digital health literacy among university students remains sparse. Rather than proposing another generic AI-literacy model, we outline an implementation agenda that connects critical health-information appraisal, misinformation resilience, responsible generative-AI use, privacy awareness, and safe escalation with cross-cutting conditions of equity, affordability, language accessibility, trusted institutional information, and faculty capacity. Universities can operationalize this agenda through curriculum integration, clear guidance for health-related AI use, strengthened library and public-health information pathways, and locally relevant evaluation. Research should move beyond self-report-only surveys toward contextually adapted measures, performance-based tasks, multi-institutional studies, and intervention evaluation. Building these capabilities alongside digital infrastructure can help make Somalia's digital-health transition safer, more equitable, and more accountable.