To kickstart work on developing standards for malaria genomics data, PHA4GE members and conference delegates gathered briefly in New Orleans while attending the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene (ASTMH) in November 2024. Initially, the aim was to bring together experts from middle-income countries and countries where malaria is endemic at a multi-day workshop. In a truncated New Orleans meeting, however, PHA4GE’s Alan Christoffels and Tracey Calvert-Joshua simply presented its funding proposal on how and what kinds of descriptive metadata had to be gathered when biosamples are collected. A major boon was having experts from Africa at the meeting, explains Calvert-Joshua, as it will inform the development of the data-gathering tool over 2025.