The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), through its Pathogen Genomics Initiative (Africa PGI), has supported African countries during the past two years in responding to the COVID19 pandemic. Cognizant of the scaleup of data generation capability, the Africa CDC, in partnership with the South African National Bioinformatics Institute (SANBI), has been designing data management protocols and tools for use in National Public Health Institutes.

On 23 May 2022, the Africa CDC, in partnership with the African Society for Laboratory Medicine (ASLM) and SANBI, launched the first in a series of hands-on bioinformatics training events held at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), South Africa. The workshop underpins the Africa CDC’s range of bioinformatics training to support countries in Africa to rapidly respond to disease outbreaks in general and to develop COVID19 surveillance in particular. 

Professor Alan Christoffels, Director of SANBI, commented: “The training covers a range of topics from an introduction to bioinformatics, data management, bioinformatics analysis, and the interpretation of genomic results, to the presentation of genomic data to inform public policy decision-making. This training represents the first of a range of data-intensive analytics support intended to meet the needs of genomic surveillance for COVID-19, other outbreaks and endemic diseases in Africa”.

“Competency in public health bioinformatics is key in our effort to expand genomic surveillance in Africa. This training is critical in building the bioinformatics capacity in public health institutes to effectively utilize NGS data and inform decision making,” said Dr Yenew Kebede, Head: Division of Laboratory Systems and Networks at the Africa CDC.

Participants are expected to put into practice the skills and knowledge gained from this training to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and future disease outbreaks. Furthermore, the training workshop will create a network of experts on the continent with the ability to collaborate on projects as well as share and exchange genomic data and data analytics resources.

The training was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) grant to the ASLM.

For more information, contact:

Africa CDC – Africa PGI
Dr Sofonias Kifle Tessema: [email protected]

SANBI
Prof Alan Christoffels: [email protected]