“Significant moment” for project as huge radio telescope begins to take shape

The Square Kilometre Array Observatory has hoisted the first collection dish of its vast radio telescope into position in South Africa’s Karoo semi-desert.

The 15 metre-wide dish was lifted into place on Thursday last week, the SKAO announced on 9 July.

It is the first of four that will be erected on site for testing before full dish production commences. SKA-Mid, as the African part of the telescope is called, will in time consist of 197 dishes.

“The first of anything is always the most challenging, and we have learnt a huge amount from a logistical and technical perspective from this first dish,” said SKA-Mid senior project manager Ben Lewis in a statement.

He added that “full speed” construction of SKA-Mid would commence “later in 2025”.

Construction progress

Meanwhile, construction of the SKA-Low telescope array in Australia is “progressing rapidly”, the SKAO said.

“The progress this year across the observatory has been amazing, and seeing the first SKA-Mid dish being erected is a significant moment, as we head towards the first stage of telescope delivery,” SKAO acting director of programmes Luca Stringhetti said in the statement.

More than 1,000 of SKA-Low’s 2 metre-tall antennae have been assembled and installed at its site in Western Australia, with more than 131,000 set to be built in total.

SKA-Mid in Africa and SKA-Low in Australia will collect data at different radio frequencies, providing complementary astronomy datasets.

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Trieste meeting pairs up researchers from developing countries with government officials

Early career scientists from Africa and other developing nations paired up with policymakers for a course on science diplomacy in Trieste, Italy, on 18-20 June.

The course was hosted by The World Academy of Sciences for the advancement of science in developing countries (Twas) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“By pairing course participants and equipping them with the relevant and necessary knowledge they need about science diplomacy, Twas and AAAS aim to forge stronger links between researchers and decision-makers living or working in the same countries,” said Twas president Quarraisha Abdool Karim in a statement.

From the African continent, Cameroon, Madagascar, Sudan and Uganda were represented at the meeting, while other represented countries included Nepal and Guatemala.

Tense issues

The programme, now in its 10th year, has trained 368 people since its 2014 launch. Twas said in its statement that these alumni are now “influencing policy” throughout the developing world.

The pairings spent three days tackling “tense diplomatic issues”, such as the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, pandemics, wars and natural disasters, according to a 17 June media statement. Participants also discussed the role of scientists in achieving the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

Sudip Parikh, chief executive officer of AAAS, said the scientist-policymaker pairing programme hopes to create “agents of change”. Karim added that it would enable the “rapid adoption of evidence-based solutions to national, regional and global challenges”.

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Details are sparse, but council would build on existing cross-border space collaborations

The South African National Space Agency will support Russia’s proposal to establish a Brics space council featuring emerging economies, it confirmed in a statement on 10 June.

Sansa head Humbulani Mudau met with heads of space agencies from other Brics nations in Moscow in late May as part of the bloc’s committee on space cooperation, established in 2022 to formalise sharing agreements around space technologies and data.

The Brics bloc until recently comprised Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. However, it is in the process of expanding, with Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates having joined earlier this year.

Mudau told the Moscow summit that South Africa, through Sansa, supported the Russian proposal of a space council and would develop its “cooperation in this direction”.

Sansa did not share details of the proposal, but the official Brics Russia 2024 summit website states that the space council will be further discussed at the next Brics summit in October in Kazan, southwest Russia.

‘Shared commitment’

In the statement, Sansa said it has an existing partnership with Russia to track space debris and announced plans to work with a Russian biomedical research group on “space and technology projects”.

“This collaborative approach to space activities, where all member countries contribute their unique perspectives, resources and expertise, is a key strength of the Brics space cooperation and a testament to the shared commitment to advancing space science and technology for the benefit of all,” the agency wrote.

The committee encouraged support for all Brics space missions during the Moscow summit. India, like China and Russia, has high ambitions for its space missions. Last July, South African president Cyril Ramaphosa congratulated Indian prime minister Narendra Modi on his country’s “historic landing of the Chandrayaan 3 on the south side of the moon”.

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Organisers list “severe” delays, onerous processes and high costs of visas as reasons for decision

The International Health Economics Association has changed the venue of its 2025 congress from Canada to Bali, in Indonesia, to avoid restrictive visa policies hindering attendance from the global south.

The rethink came after the organisers became aware of “severe delays” in securing Canadian visa application outcomes—up to eight months for some nationalities—as well as the “onerous process and high costs involved”, the IHEA’s leadership said in a statement.

The IHEA congress was meant to take place in Calgary on 19-23 July, 2025. Ease of visa access for developing country participants had been a key factor in selecting the location, according to the statement by Kara Hanson, IHEA president, and Di McIntyre, IHEA executive director. 

When reports of the prospective delays reached the organisers, the IHEA board tried to find ways to speed up the visa process for its attendees. One challenge was that several of the association’s members could not apply for a visa until their presentation abstract was accepted and they had secured funding to attend.

“We brought various deadlines forward to help with this, but despite all our best efforts we were legitimately concerned that equitable attendance at the event would be threatened,” Hanson and McIntyre said. In 2023, the event attracted representatives of a record 106 countries when it was held in Cape Town, South Africa. “This is not a risk that we are willing to take,” they added.

The statement went on to urge governments to end visa discrimination as well as other forms of discrimination that hinder the free movement of people with legitimate reasons to travel. “In this unsettled world, facilitating research and policy conversations among scholars from different parts of the globe, who are free to bring their true selves along with their ideas, seems more important than ever.”

The congress will take place in Bali on the same dates as originally planned.

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Africa CDC and Wellcome Trust launch programme to train leaders in evidence-based psychiatry

The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has announced a new leadership programme supported by the Wellcome Trust to update Africa’s “outdated” mental health policies.

They unveiled their African Mental Health Programme to African health ministers and the World Health Organization at the 77th World Health Assembly in Geneva last week, according to a statement published by Africa CDC on 30 May.

“Mental health policies in Africa are mostly outdated and poorly implemented,” said Jean Kaseya, director-general of Africa CDC, in the statement.

Moreover, the Africa CDC says, the continent’s mental health services are under-resourced. Less than two per cent of health budgets go towards mental health, and of that allocation, nine-tenths goes to psychiatric institutions in capital cities. There are also only 1.4 mental health workers per 100,000 people in Africa, the agency says.

Cohort of leaders

Wellcome Trust chief executive John Arne Røttingen said the programme will address these resource shortages by creating a “cohort of leaders who understand and can advocate for context-specific, evidence-based approaches” in their countries.

He added that scientists must work “hand-in-hand” with policymakers to ensure that mental health research tackles the right questions, and that scientific findings are put into action.

Africa CDC will be working with a number of organisations to develop and implement the programme’s curriculum. One of them is Netherlands-based charity CBM Global, which will create links between African civil society and governments to support mental health.

In his address to the programme launch, CBM Global’s executive director, David Bainbridge, underscored the need to take a “human rights approach” to mental health.

“We’re particularly concerned about the experiences of stigma, social exclusion and abuse experienced by affected people, who are often denied access to basic rights like family life, livelihoods, even personal autonomy and freedom,” he said.

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Global integrity conference hears calls for more support in design phase of international collaborations

Research funders have been urged to support pre-grant networking to promote equal research partnerships between high- and low-income countries. 

The call was made during a session of the World Conference on Research Integrity that took place in Athens, Greece, this week.

Lyn Horn, director of the research integrity office of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, told the conference on 4 June that it still happens that partners in low- and middle-income countries are invited onto research projects when the direction of the project is all but set.

She said “this can lead to power imbalances between teams”, which in turn can result in projects neglecting local priorities. It can even scupper the research outcome if the study design does not fully understand the communities in which the research is being done, she said.

Pre-funding

One solution to this problem would be for funders to offer “pre-funding” for people to get together and set their research priorities before submitting their application, Horn said.

Counting how many partnership programmes offer such support could be one way of measuring progress in fighting inequity in research, she added. 

“I really support Lyn’s recommendation to put aside funding to allow this to happen,” said Michelle Brear, a public health researcher based at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.

“Without this sort of money, it’s really difficult to have proper engagements,” she said.

Equity toolkit

Brear told the conference she had developed an equity toolkit for the Association of Commonwealth Universities.

The toolkit targets the conception stage of a project as a “crucial” stage for promoting equity, she said, adding that there are still significant gaps in our knowledge of what an equitable partnership looks like.

“We still need to work together to know what equity is,” she said.

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“Innovation should be placed at the beginning,” says UK-based professor

Investment in African science, technology and innovation needs to be supplemented by policies that stress its real-world use, an innovation expert from the UK has said.

Norman Clark, an expert in innovation systems and development, made the comment during a webinar on 23 May arranged by the African Network for Economics of Learning, Innovation and Competence-Building Systems.

He told the webinar that in policymaking, the words “science, technology and innovation” were still far too heavily loaded in favour of science and technology.

“In my view, innovation should be placed at the beginning and it may not even involve much science and technology,” said Clark, who holds emeritus professor posts at the Open University and the University of Strathclyde.

Going for growth

The network, established in 2012, brings together scholars, researchers and policy analysts who study development, innovation, learning and competence building in an African context.

In the webinar, Clark drew on a paper he wrote that was published on 1 April in the International Journal of Technology Management and Sustainable Development.

In the paper, Clark argues that there has been a strong tendency for public investment in science, technology and innovation in Africa to be confined to national science councils and higher education bodies, with little direct impact on production.

He writes that instead of creating policy structures to link science and technology directly with economic activity, African governments have focused their action on presidential offices and big laboratories with no clear link to promoting economic growth.

Such bodies have shown little impact when needed most, and they neglect to bring the focus back to production and away from science, Clark told the webinar.

“This might mean that scientific institutions like national councils of science and technology should change what they do and how they do it and interact much more closely with industry and make that part of their daily job,” he said.

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William Ruto highlights need to address emerging public health threats during state visit

The Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) renewed its partnership with the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on 21 May during an official state visit by Kenyan president William Ruto.

Following the renewal ceremony at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Ruto posted on social media platform X that new agreements were also signed with the US health ministry to bring HIV/AIDS relief in Kenya, and for the operationalisation of the Kenya National Public Health Institute.

KEMRI confirmed its continued collaboration with the CDC in a public statement, saying the five-year agreement will expand research to address “public health threats and emergencies”. The institute wrote that the new agreement builds on 45 years of partnership between the CDC and Kenya’s public health and laboratory systems.

“The agreement will also see the dissemination and application of research findings for policy formulation, training of public health professionals, strengthening research leadership and laboratory capabilities, staff exchanges, and sharing of research information and materials in accordance with Kenyan laws,” KEMRI wrote.

Appealing destination

Ruto’s press office said his visit to the CDC headquarters was intended to highlight the “critical role” that higher education, science and technology plays in attracting investment to his country, as well as to show that Kenya is an “appealing destination for tech jobs”.

“Increasing grants to KEMRI will help establish strong intellectual property and scientific entrepreneurship frameworks,” said Ruto in a speech ahead of the signing ceremony at the CDC. He added that the move will also help Kenya focus on pharmaceutical and biomedical product development and manufacturing.

Ruto also invited America’s “leading health training institutions”, including the Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine and John Hopkins, Harvard, Columbia, Duke and Emory universities to create exchange programmes with Kenyan universities that will address “emerging threats” like zoonotic diseases.

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Europe-funded clinical trials partnership offers grants worth €5 million, with a two-week deadline

An Africa-Europe clinical trials partnership has announced “emergency” funding to bolster research and innovation on Mpox as cases rise in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The funding—announced on 15 May—will prioritise projects focusing on the development of vaccines and other therapeutics, surveillance, diagnostics and epidemiology.

The funding announcement comes a month after African governments and international health bodies met in Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, agreeing on the need for “timely, accurate and quality information” on the Mpox situation in Africa.

Mpox is a viral disease that causes a rash and fever, and in some cases death. Interest in the disease has grown since an outbreak that started in 2022, in which tens of thousands of cases were detected outside the central and west African countries where it is traditionally found.

Cross-border risks

Since the beginning of the year, the DRC has reported 5,900 suspected cases of Mpox and 335 deaths. Cases have been reported in 23 of the country’s 26 provinces, and there is “serious risk for cross-border situations”, the European Union’s delegation to the African Union said in a statement.

“This initiative aims to deepen our understanding of the outbreak, develop prevention and management strategies, and enhance public health responses, including in a regional and continental perspective,” the EU delegation said.

The new programme will offer a total of €5 million through the Global Health European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership 3, a Europe-funded collaborative research initiative. Projects are estimated to receive €1.25m each.

Grants will prioritise projects that commit to share data quickly, to ensure that research findings can be immediately applied in clinical settings.

The deadline for applications is 29 May.

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Outgoing EU head of international research cooperation outlines “exciting and challenging times”

A new commission and parliament later this year means the European Union is facing “exciting and challenging times”, one of its lead international research cooperation officials has said.

Despite this, there is “solid ground for moving ahead” in the EU’s partnership with Africa, Maria Cristina Russo, director of global approach and international cooperation in research and innovation at the European Commission, told a conference this week.

Russo, who is leaving the post for that of ‘prosperity director’ of the commission’s research and innovation arm, was speaking at the fourth Africa-Europe Science Collaboration Forum held in Brussels, Belgium, from 22 to 25 April.

She said the current commission is being phased out, and that a new one will be in place in November. That, and EU parliamentary elections on 9 June, means “there will be a change in the political leadership”, she said.

“There are a lot of discussions ongoing on what this change should look like,” she said. While there are calls to defend and strengthen Europe, Russo said that Europe “cannot revamp on its own”.

The fact that both Africa and Europe have set targets to increase domestic R&D financing binds them together, she added.

“We have important challenges ahead. The fact that we have similar challenges can only bring us closer together.” 

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Metabolism maps will boost ocean governance and stewardship, says CSIR researcher

South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research announced on 18 April that one of its researchers has joined the ‘BioGeoScapes’ ocean modelling effort alongside researchers from 30 other countries.

Tommy Ryan-Keogh, an expert in ocean biogeochemistry, will be examining how climate change could impact the ocean’s ‘metabolism’ over the next 100 years, the CSIR said in a statement.

One of the project’s goals is to map the distribution of microbes and their genes across every ocean basin, the CSIR said.

The programme also connects the work of different scientific communities to “gain a holistic understanding of how the ocean system works” and to understand “how human perturbations may alter the biogeochemical cycles of the ocean”.

African representation

The CSIR wrote that Ryan-Keogh’s participation ensures Africa is well represented in the project.

“As a committee member representing the CSIR and South Africa, I am assisting the leadership team to drive the conversation on ocean metabolism, nutrient cycles and their impact on the planet,” he said.

The BioGeoScapes website lists fellow South African scientists Thulani Makhalanyane and Susanne Fietz, both from Stellenbosch University, as programme ambassadors alongside Ryan-Keogh, but no other African countries are represented yet.

Ryan-Keogh said he believed involving as many countries as possible in the programme will generate more robust information for policymakers, leading to better stewardship of the oceans. He added that inclusivity and the transfer of skills from developed to developing nations are priorities for BioGeoScapes.

According to BioGeoScapes’s website, its international network activities are funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation in the United States.

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Donor-funded scheme aims to redress geographic imbalance in usage of huge biomedical resource

The world’s largest biomedical database will offer researchers from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) free access through a donor-funded scheme launched this week.

The UK Biobank Global Researcher Access Fund, backed by companies that include AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb and Johnson & Johnson, will pay the application costs normally levied for accessing the biobank’s data.

UK Biobank holds de-identified genetic and health data from 500,000 UK participants and is accessible to scientists all over the world. However, in the past 12 years only about 50 projects have been conducted on the data by scientists from low- and middle-income countries.

The new fund could triple that number, says the biobank’s head of research development Lauren Carson. The fund currently has between US$70,000 and US$90,000 at its disposal, although more donations are coming all the time, Carson says. “It’s a fantastic initiative in my view.”

Cost barrier

The biobank charges UK-based researchers a fee of £9000 plus VAT for three-year access to its data. This was reduced to £500 plus VAT for LMIC researchers to improve access.

However, feedback received by the biobank showed that many still found the cost too high. To address this, the new fund will cover the reduced fee for bona fide researchers undertaking biomedical research for public benefit.

The fund provides so-called Tier 3 access, which is the highest access tier to the biobank’s data, and includes whole genome sequencing data, whole exome sequencing data and full-body scan imaging data.

Applications for support from the fund can be done on the same platform as regular applications for access, the biobank explains on its website.

Democratising data

A handful of projects have already received support from the fund, Carson says. She adds that more funders are being approached to contribute to the initiative, and that the biobank is also looking at ways to offer training for LMIC researchers. 

“We will be going and speaking to other companies and also other funding bodies, such as the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust, in future to see if they [would] be interested in collaborating in this fund as well,” she says.

One of the fund’s early beneficiaries is Abhishek Appaji, a biomedical engineer based at the BMS College of Engineering Bengaluru in India.

Appaji will use UK Biobank data to look at how psychiatric disorders can be better diagnosed and monitored. He says he hopes this will boost his research productivity, and urges others to take advantage of the fund to conduct high-impact, locally relevant research.

“When I did my PhD, I was keen on having access to something like this. Now six or seven years later, I have it,” he told Research Professional News.

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Infectious disease and vaccine policy expert Kathleen Neuzil to start in May

The US National Institutes of Health has named Kathleen Neuzil as the next director of the Fogarty International Centre.

Neuzil will be the first woman to hold this position since the centre was founded in 1968. The centre supports global health research, fosters international partnerships and trains scientists around the world.

Neuzil will start in May, taking over from Peter Kilmarx who has led the centre as interim director since Roger Glass retired in January last year.

‘Leading scientist’

The NIH said Neuzil’s appointment reflects her “impressive” track record in clinical and epidemiological research on infectious diseases.

Her role as a vaccine policy advisor to organisations like the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization also worked in her favour, it said.

Anita Zaid, president of Gender Equality at the Gates Foundation, welcomed Neuzil’s appointment. She wrote on social media: “Dr Neuzil is one of the leading scientists in the world for vaccine research in low- to middle-income countries—and she is a superb choice for this role.”

African footprint

The Fogarty International Center has a large footprint in Africa, its fellowships and trainees often emerging as influential figures within the medical community, driving positive change and innovation.

Researchers who the centre have helped along the way include Salim Abdool Karim, Glenda Gray and Linda-Gail Becker.

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Investment is needed to build continent’s own capacity to predict weather, scientists say

A team of climate scientists has asserted that “external solutions” are not always the best for Africa and risk leaving the continent reliant on the global north.

The team, which consists of scientists from Europe and Africa, instead called for more support to train African scientists in the skills and tools they need to provide their communities with locally designed climate solutions.

In a commentary published in Nature Communications on 26 March, the team led by researchers at the University of Leeds highlighted four challenges to African climate science: gaps in the underlying science; data gaps; modelling and forecasting gaps; and a lack of local capacity, which leads to reliance on the global north.

“External solutions are not always the best for Africa, and unless longstanding challenges to African capacity and capability are addressed, the investment will lack sustainability, as has been seen many times in the past,” Leeds meteorologist Douglas Parker, who co-wrote the commentary, said in a statement.

New approaches needed

Parker sketched a scenario where flood management authorities ask their weather service for forecasts to be delivered for a particular city, but these can only be provided by a partner “thousands of miles away in Europe”.

Benjamin Lamptey, the commentary’s lead author, is affiliated with the West African Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use in Accra, Ghana. He said that new approaches to weather prediction needed to be developed in Africa, for Africa.

“Every year, projects are funded across Africa to establish better weather prediction services, but very often when the project ends, the African teams still lack skills and infrastructure to maintain those services independently,” said Lamptey, a visiting professor at Leeds.

Although weather prediction always requires international cooperation for sharing of data, Lamptey said Africa should not always be reliant on the global north for “basic things”.

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Humanities and social science publisher “repurposes” read-only fees to pay for open access

Social science and humanities researchers in southern Africa will be able to publish articles for free in Taylor & Francis open-access journals under a deal announced last week.

The agreement between the UK publisher and the South African National Library and Information Consortium (SANLiC) is the publisher’s first in sub-Saharan Africa. It will allow researchers in South Africa, Botswana and Namibia to publish in over 2,100 open-access journals for the next three years.

The deal, which also includes training and resources for researchers entering the open-access publishing space, was announced by Taylor & Francis on 22 March. Under the arrangement, open-access publishing will be paid by repurposing the subscription fees that institutions currently pay for researchers’ access to journal articles, said Ellen Tise, who chairs the SANLiC board.

No additional fees

Researchers from participating institutions will be able to publish in all Taylor & Francis “hybrid” open-access journals while retaining their copyright and without paying any fee, she said.

Hybrid open access is where journals that charge subscription fees give authors the option of publishing open access by paying a fee.

The agreement also covers Routledge hybrid journals, which include the University of South Africa Press and National Inquiry Services Centre co-published titles, and will allow faculty and students to read more than 1,900 humanities, social science, science and technology titles.

“When added to our 13 other such agreements, over 80 per cent of South African research traditionally published behind a paywall now has the potential to be published fully open access without additional fees,” said Tise.

Nitasha Devasar, Taylor & Francis vice-president and commercial lead for India, South Asia and Africa, said the agreement will boost “global reach, visibility and impact” for South African, Namibian and Botswanan researchers.

“At the heart of this partnership lies a commitment to championing diversity and equity in scholarly communication, particularly amplifying the voices and contributions from the Global South,” she said.

Cushioning cuts

Phethiwe Matutu, the chief executive of Universities South Africa, said the deal will help cushion universities against state funding cuts that impact library resources.

However, her predecessor, Ahmed Bawa from the University of Johannesburg, who was not involved in this agreement but worked on South Africa’s draft open-science policy in 2022, told Research Professional News that while the agreement was an important step towards open science, there was a risk of exacerbating unequal access.

“If we are to make true progress towards an open-science platform, we must recognise the need for the overhauling of the scientific publishing industry. This is very much on the agenda of the International Science Council and the International Association of Universities,” he said.

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RI Days: Dashboard will display innovation projects contributing to AU-EU joint strategy

The African Union and EU have launched a dashboard that will display projects aligning with their 2023 joint innovation agenda as a step towards implementing their vision for 2030.

Launched this week, the ‘Dashboard of initiatives’ is intended to help coordinate innovation efforts and investment in environmental sustainability, health and technology.

At the European Commission’s Research and Innovation Days conference in Brussels on 20 March, African Union innovation commissioner Mohamed Belhocine (pictured) welcomed the dashboard as “a continuation of our horizontal engagement”.

Making an impact

He said he hoped that “where we are investing together will make an impact for the local populations”. The African Union itself is “providing tools” but not implementing the agenda per se, he said, explaining: “It will be up to the teams in the field to take it further.”

Hans Christian Stausboll, acting director of the Africa unit in the European Commission department for international partnerships, said that there are existing joint innovation projects whose progress can now be followed via the dashboard.

Moving forwards, he said that the “political commitment is there; now we just need to implement” the agenda.

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Global Fund money will bolster West African nation’s health systems and fund treatment

International health funding giant the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria announced on 15 March that €102 million (US$110.6m) worth of grants has been allocated to Mali, with more investment on the way.

In a public statement, the fund said medical services in the central and northern regions of Mali are under strain due to security threats, and much of the country’s healthcare depends on humanitarian aid and non-governmental organisations.

The grants will be implemented in partnership with Mali’s health ministry and two Bamako-based NGOs: Arcad Santé Plus and Plan International Mali.

Malaria grant incoming

The €102m will fund three grants—two to treat up to 96,000 people for HIV and TB by 2026, and a third to support health systems more generally. The latter will fund laboratories, supply chains, information systems and community health workers.

A fourth grant, to fund malaria, is also in the works, the organisation said. “The malaria grant—for an anticipated maximum amount of €85m—is currently being drafted and will be signed by the end of the year,” it said.

“The strong partnership between Mali and the Global Fund has been a driving force in supporting the resilience of Mali’s health system, as well as the fight against Aids, tuberculosis and malaria,” said Mali’s minister of health and social development, Assa Badiallo Touré, in a statement.

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Neglected and emerging disease investments result in big economic returns for US economy, analysis finds

The United States government spends less on global health R&D than it should considering the returns such investments bring taxpayers, and the growing risk that emerging and neglected health threats pose, health advocacy agencies have said.

The two agencies analysed US global health R&D funding and found it “generated billions of dollars in economic benefits” by spurring on industry investments. Yet they say in their 14 March report that the funding is “modest” in the context of public investment in other spending areas, such as defence.

The US government invested US$46 billion in global health R&D between 2007 and 2022, chiefly through agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the US Agency for International Development.

This investment has not only delivered new drugs, vaccines and prevention tools, but also supported basic research expected to ultimately generate US$255bn for the US economy.

But with climate change impacting disease patterns, the need is growing, and government funding is not keeping up, said Kristie Mikus, executive director of the Global Health Technologies Coalition, a health R&D advocacy organisation based in Washington, DC, that carried out the analysis in partnership with Policy Cures Research, an Australia-based global health think-tank.

“The irony is that despite producing blockbuster returns, public funding for global health R&D is not keeping pace with growing needs and increasing risk,” said Mikus in a statement.

“We encourage policymakers to look at global health R&D as one of the best investments a government can make, right up there with roads, schools and national defence,” she added.

This being an election year, the GHTC told Research Professional News it hoped the findings of the report would be taken to heart regardless of who is in power come January.

“Global health has enjoyed bipartisan support for the past two decades. As this report shows, investments in global health R&D benefit everyone, and we would anticipate continued bipartisan support from policymakers in congress,” it said.

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Two funding programmes will support research networks across Africa and the UK

The UK government will support research in physics across several African countries through two distinct funding programmes, research bodies in the UK and South Africa announced on 12 March.

The Africa-UK Physics Partnership Programme will get £10.33m (US$13.2m) of the £24.96m total funds to support physics researchers in seven sub-Saharan countries: Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda.

The programme, a collaboration between the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and the UK Institute of Physics, will focus on the science, technology and policy challenges of climate change and sustainable energy.

“This funding is going to support valuable opportunities for UK and African physicists to work on solutions and learn from each other,” said the IOP’s Rachel Youngman.

The rest of the funds will support physics collaborations between South Africa’s National Research Foundation and the STFC via the Research Infrastructure Partnership Programme.

“The linking of key South African research platforms to those within the STFC is very exciting and will lead to staff exchanges, training opportunities and, most importantly, innovative research,” said acting NRF deputy chief executive Angus Paterson.

This programme will help the NRF develop historically disadvantaged research institutions in South Africa, and it will boost radio astronomy capacity in other African countries, the NRF said in a statement.

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Office will support local vaccine manufacturing

The International Vaccine Institute has announced that it will be establishing an office in Kenya.

The announcement on 28 February followed a meeting on sustainable vaccine manufacturing at the 37th African Union summit 10 days earlier. The meeting was convened by the IVI, the Kenyan government and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

In a statement, the IVI said the new office would serve as the headquarters for Avec Africa, an IVI initiative on advancing vaccine end-to-end capabilities.

“Through collaborations with research centres and universities, manufacturers, clinical trial sites, government and regional governing bodies, Avec Africa aims to not only synchronise the essential cogs of a well-running vaccine industry but to give it its engine,” said Jerome Kim, director-general of the IVI.

Local support

Michael Lusiola, managing director of Kenya’s BioVax Institute, a partner in the initiative, said: “The setting up of the IVI Avec Project Office in Kenya will go a long way in supporting the establishment of local vaccine manufacturing capabilities here at BioVax.” 

He added that the Kenyan office would collaborate closely with the IVI’s regional Africa office in Rwanda to meet targets of vaccine self-sufficiency. The Rwanda office, which will be operational later this year, will provide on-the-ground support and leadership for the IVI’s work in Africa.

The IVI has 39 member countries and collaborates with the World Health Organization on vaccine delivery, costs and safety. It is headquartered in South Korea, with a European regional office in Sweden and a country office in Austria. 

The issue of equitable access to vaccines in Africa, and a lack of capacity and infrastructure for vaccine research and development, gained prominence during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention have set a target to manufacture 60 per cent of the continent’s vaccine needs locally by 2040.

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Philanthropic grant creates network to help discover new treatments for prevalent diseases on continent

A pan-African drug discovery research network will be created thanks to a US$7.2 million grant announced this week by two philanthropic funders.

The investment, by British research charity LifeArc and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will fund the Grand Challenges Africa Drug Discovery Accelerator programme.

The programme will support a number of research projects, as well as the Grand Challenges ADDA network, which will be led by the South Africa-based Holistic Drug Discovery and Development Centre (H3D) Foundation.

Kelly Chibale, founding director of the H3D research centre at the University of Cape Town and a pioneer in African drug discovery, called the grant a “major leap forward” in a 28 February statement.

Unmet need

A total of US$4.7m of the grant will go to projects to deliver new drugs against malaria and TB, led by researchers from the universities of Pretoria and Stellenbosch in South Africa and the University of Ghana.

“We have to propel existing discoveries forward by building on our capacity and expertise,” said the University of Pretoria’s Lyn-Marie Birkholtz, one of the research leaders, in a statement.

Other research projects will be led by scientists at the University of Buea in Cameroon, and at the African Institute of Biomedical Science and Technology in Zimbabwe. These will focus on screening traditional medicine compounds for drug candidates and pharmacogenetics research.

“A unique environment and opportunity has been created, where world-class scientists from disease-endemic countries can collaborate to discover new drugs to address unmet patient needs on their doorstep,” said James Duffy, senior director of drug discovery at the Medicines for Malaria Venture, a Switzerland-based nonprofit that will support the programme’s work on malaria.

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Fourteen dishes will boost sensitivity of South Africa’s SKA precursor by 50 per cent

The first of 14 extension dishes was added to the MeerKAT radio telescope last week at its site outside Carnarvon in the Karoo.

The addition will increase the instrument’s sensitivity by around 50 per cent, the 21 February handover ceremony heard.

The 64-dish MeerKAT is the largest radio telescope in the Southern Hemisphere and a precursor instrument to the Square Kilometre Array being built in South Africa and Australia.

Built and operated by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (Sarao), the extended MeerKAT, known as MeerKAT+, is expected to be ready by 2027.

“The project started only in 2019 and it is great to see that the first successes of this joint project are now visible,” said Pontsho Maruping, managing director of Sarao, in a statement.

Joint financing

MeerKAT’s expansion will “provide an even more powerful instrument to study the formation and evolution of galaxies throughout the history of the universe”, South Africa’s science minister, Blade Nzimande, told a conference held in Stellenbosch last week to celebrate the first five years of MeerKAT.

The handover ceremony of the first dish was attended by representatives from the Max Planck Society in Germany and Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Italy, which are financing the 14 new dishes jointly with Sarao.

Sarao and the Max Planck Society each contributed R400 million (US$20.8m) towards the MeerKAT+ project in 2020. INAF was not a partner at that time but has since contributed €6m (US$6.5m).

Sarao’s initial plan was to add 20 new dishes but has since been revised down to 14 due to funding restraints. The agency is still looking for funding to build the remaining dishes, its head of communications and science engagement, Khulu Phasiwe, told Research Professional News.

“As more funding becomes available, management will revise the plan,” he said.

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Partnership aims to strengthen tech startups, computer literacy and cybersecurity

A “landmark” agreement signed this week with tech giant Google will see African nations receive support for digital startups, computer training and cybersecurity.

The agreement, signed on 19 February between the UN Economic Commission for Africa and Google on the sidelines of the 2024 Africa Business Forum in Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, aims to “foster and accelerate digital transformation in Africa”.

Under the agreement, Google will make “hundreds” of its employees available to mentor and coach African tech startups. This will support the ECA’s aim to see one million African startups generate US$100 billion in revenue by 2033.

More than 5,000 African students and 200 teachers will be taught computer science and robotics. This will focus on 10 or more countries, including Ethiopia, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, South Africa, South Sudan, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

‘Resilient culture’

Finally, Google will collaborate with the ECA on cybersecurity research. The two also want to “foster a resilient culture of digital security” in the African region through public sector dialogues, training workshops and best-practice sharing.

“This partnership holds the potential to produce significant and influential outcomes in tackling digital challenges and narrowing the digital divide across the African continent,” ECA executive-secretary Claver Gatete said in a statement.

The partnership will also target artificial intelligence technologies, and aim to “advance AI policy research” in Africa.

“With advanced technologies like AI, the most profound transformation is yet to come,” said Doron Avni, Google’s vice-president of government affairs and public policy for emerging markets. 

“Collaboration will be essential if Africa is to realise this opportunity and ensure no one is left behind.”

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Investment aims to spur genomic surveillance and strengthen public health laboratories in African Union

The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, and its European counterpart, the EU’s Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority, have entered into two agreements to improve health systems across the African continent.

Funded through a €6 million (US$6.5m) commitment made by the EU on 5 February, the agreements aim to support the scaling-up of genomic surveillance of diseases, and to strengthen public health laboratory network capacities for outbreak detection and response.

The agreements were announced during a health dialogue between EU and African representatives held at the AU’s headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 

A further €150 billion investment in African health will be raised through the Global Gateway Africa-Europe Investment Package by 2027, the meeting heard.

Equity in focus

The announcement is the culmination of a negotiation process that has seen the two continents discuss ways to improve health and outbreak responses on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea.

“We continue our bilateral work with the African Union to enhance preparedness response to future pandemics,” said Stella Kyriakides, the EU’s commissioner for health and food safety.

The partnership strives to be equal, she added: “Enhanced equity has been a core principle in our contribution to these talks from the beginning. We sincerely hope the fruits of the negotiations will be seen in a final agreement that is fair, meaningful and workable.”

Building resilience

Representatives at the meeting agreed to ramp up the resilience of health systems on both continents in response to rapidly changing health burdens and climate change. They also pledged to explore ways to work together on humanitarian policy and action with a focus on underfunded and forgotten crises.

Africa CDC deputy director Ahmed Ogwell Ouma noted that the EU-AU partnership had been instrumental in tackling emerging and re-emerging disease outbreaks on the continent, promoting public health awareness and providing technical capacity to AU member states.

He said his organisation was looking forward to seeing the results of the three-day meeting translated into practice, adding “I’m confident in our approach to building a more resilient and responsive health system in Africa, which would be better equipped to address current and future health challenges facing the continent.”

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Former world leaders warn that negotiations have stalled amid competing global crises

Health advocates and former political leaders have warned that efforts to agree a pandemic accord to manage future outbreaks more equitably are losing steam and need urgent support.

World leaders are expected to adopt a pandemic accord at the 77th World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland, in May. But in an open letter dated 30 January, representatives from various organisations, including former world leaders, say there are “worrying signs” of a stalemate.

“A new pandemic threat is inevitable. A new pandemic is not—if we act now,” states the letter, whose signatories include former World Health Organization director-general Gro Harlem Brundtland, Liberia’s former president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark.

“We welcome the efforts of negotiators in Geneva in this challenging process so far. But as the agreed adoption deadline rapidly approaches, there are worrying signs of stalemate on several issues which go to the heart of a transformative and equitable international system for pandemic preparedness and response,” they say.

Challenging task

The World Health Assembly agreed to launch a process to develop a global accord on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response in December 2021. The treaty aims to address the inequalities laid bare during the Covid-19 pandemic, including in the access to new treatments and vaccines.

However, competing international crises including growing political instability threaten to overshadow negotiations, a spokesperson for the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, a joint arm of the World Health Organization and the World Bank whose leaders are among the open letter’s signatories, told Research Professional News.

“The world is experiencing multiple crises and conflicts, and this is making the task of the negotiators even more challenging,” the spokesperson said. There are many matters to resolve before the formal deadline for negotiations of May 2024, they added. “Given the many divisions and uncertainties, this was the right time to speak out in unison.”

Aggrey Aluso, executive director of Resilience Action Network Africa and one of the letter’s signatories, told Research Professional News that the aim of the letter is to “inject some much-needed momentum” into the negotiations.

“The lack of political attention from the highest levels of government is putting this process in jeopardy,” he said.

Urgent action

In October, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board warned that capacities were weak, or even declining, in areas including global coordination of R&D, efforts to address misinformation and the participation of low- and middle-income countries in decision-making.

The open letter lists three areas where more effort is needed to fulfil the promise of the treaty negotiations. First, equity needs to be at the heart of the treaty, with each region able to research, develop, manufacture and distribute new tools such as vaccines, diagnostic tests and treatments. Second, “ambitious increases” are needed in domestic pandemic financing in all countries, including for R&D.

And third, they say, there must be ways to measure fulfilment of the commitments made under the treaty. “Without such assurance, a new pathogen simply has licence to spread,” the letter says.

“In summary, we call on leaders today to step up now and empower your negotiators to make the decisions which would ensure an ambitious and legally binding pandemic accord.”

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Collaboration sets out to broaden reach of genomic surveillance to detect epidemics

Two genomic surveillance labs in South Africa and the United Kingdom have announced a collaboration that will see them join forces to study emerging threats posed by contagious disease.

The partnership between the Wellcome Sanger Institute’s Genomics Surveillance Unit in London and Stellenbosch University’s Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation was announced on 25 January.

Both laboratories are well-known for their role in identifying new variants of the Sars-CoV-2 virus during the Covid-19 pandemic. They said in a statement that the partnership will allow them to share resources, coordinate strategies and expand both the geographic reach of their disease surveillance and the range of diseases they study.

“Our institutes may be thousands of miles apart but our aims and thinking could not be closer,” said John Stilltoe, director of the GSU at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.

Great hopes

A spokesperson for the Wellcome Sanger Institute told Research Professional News that the partnership would initially draw on the two labs’ existing funding but added that the new setup makes it possible to apply for joint funding for shared projects in the future.

Tulio de Oliveira, the founding director of CERI who led one of the teams that discovered the Omicron Sars-CoV-2 variant in Southern Africa, will also join Wellcome Sanger Institute’s GSU as deputy director, fulfilling the role from his base in South Africa.

De Oliveira said: “We are really excited to launch this new partnership with the GSU. Between our two teams, we can share complementary facilities and work together on many diseases.”

He added that the collaboration has already caught the attention of governments and funders. “We are in a good position now to respond effectively to epidemics in our own regions and support genomic surveillance across the world.”

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Non-communicable diseases, climate change and research careers among priorities of science partnerships

The United Kingdom has earmarked up to R1 billion (£42 million) for research collaborations with South Africa over the next two years, the British High Commissioner in Pretoria announced this week.

The funds will come from the UK’s International Science Partnership Fund, which was launched with an initial £119m in December 2022 and received an additional £218m late last year.

Antony Phillipson (pictured), UK High Commissioner to South Africa, announced the commitment on 23 January at a ceremony attended by South Africa’s science minister Blade Nzimande and the UK’s Prince Edward, Duke of Edinburgh.

“We look forward to continuing to work together, to amplify the impacts of our science partnerships together over the months and years ahead,” Phillipson said.

‘Driving economic prosperity’

The UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office said the joint projects with South Africa would target non-communicable diseases, support early career researchers, fuel sustainable development, and study and address impacts of climate change.

“Crucially, it will support the development of robust research and innovation systems across South Africa, with the aim of driving economic development and prosperity,” it said.

Nzimande said his department was prepared to “co-design and co-fund” projects supported by the scheme. “At a time when international friendship and partnership, as well as multilateralism, are under threat, science diplomacy has a crucial role to play, which we should protect and nurture,” he said.

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Investment increase aims to offset global drop in development aid, foundation says

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has announced its largest-ever annual budget, unveiling US$8.6 billion to support projects in areas including global health in the coming year.

“A portion” of the extra funding will support global health innovations, particularly relating to newborn babies and pregnant mothers, the foundation said. The investment comes as global health budgets are shrinking, while aid to sub-Saharan Africa decreased by 8 per cent in 2022, it added.

“This new high-water mark for our budget will further our mission to help create a world where everyone has the opportunity to live a healthy, productive life,” said foundation chief executive Mark Suzman in a statement.

Making the announcement at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, founder Bill Gates said his foundation wanted to increase spending while commitments to aid worldwide are shrinking. Inequities in health are giving him sleepless nights, he said—especially as many of the innovations required to prevent deaths already exist.

“We can’t talk about the future of humanity without talking about the future of health,” Gates said. He used the platform provided by the World Economic Forum to highlight innovations his foundation has already funded, including tools that it estimates could save 65,000 women from dying of postpartum bleeding by 2030.

The foundation’s 2024 budget is a 4 per cent increase on last year and is up US$2bn from 2021. It said it plans to increase its annual spending to US$9bn by 2026.

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Rebecca Hanlin describes how brainstorming event charted path for new innovation fund

A ‘science policy hackathon’ took place in the run-up to last week’s Science Forum South Africa in Pretoria. The aim of the event was to brainstorm out-of-the-box ideas for boosting innovation in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region.

The best proposals from the hackathon were presented at the SFSA on 8 December, where one project was crowned the winner. Here, Rebecca Hanlin, innovation and sustainable development professor at the University of Johannesburg, explains what a hackathon is and why the winner was chosen.

What is a policy hackathon?

It is an event or competition that brings together individuals, often experts or stakeholders in a field, to address and propose innovative solutions to complex policy challenges. It can be a dynamic way to co-create policy solutions, since traditional policy development is often a lengthy and bureaucratic process. Hackathons are still a relatively new innovation on the African continent.

Who participated in this one?

Since the hackathon addressed issues of the SADC region, it was necessary to ensure there was a variety of representation. We also benefited from those who had experience of cross-border collaboration in other parts of the world. 

What was the winning idea?

It was a publicly funded investment fund for the SADC region focusing on funding and mentoring startups dubbed Strive, which stands for Science, Technology, Research, Innovation and Enterprise Fund. It would be open to any organisation or venture in the region and support anything from microventures to formal commercial ventures, although through different funding streams.

How would it be funded?

It would be funded through financial contributions from each SADC member state based on their GDP, and also additional funding from other sources, like private equity firms, corporate social responsibility donations, private investors or philanthropic organisations. Its long-term sustainability would be based on taking equity or shares in the companies funded through the fund. Over time, the fund should become self-financing.

How would innovators access the fund?

Funding would be allocated based on proposals, and a portion of the fund would be ringfenced for projects that demonstrate high levels of social return but are riskier investments and would therefore likely have longer time for payback. It would also allow beneficiaries to access technical assistance and capacity strengthening to build the STI ecosystem.

Why was Strive chosen?

It was innovative in that it blended public and private funding, and focused on inclusion through ringfencing funds for riskier ventures. Of all the proposals developed at the hackathon, it also had the strongest outline of the way in which the fund might work.

What is the next step for this proposal?

A report will be developed in early 2024 on the policy hackathon pilot and recommendations for the future. The recommendations will be taken forward by the Transformative Innovation Policy community of practice in South Africa.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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Twelve-country study will survey toll of unemployment, poverty, climate change and poor education

South Africa’s National Research Foundation has embarked on a research programme to study the wellbeing of young people in the Global South.

The 12-country programme will be launched this week, on 8 December, at the Science Forum South Africa in Pretoria.

Titled u’GOOD!?, the programme is a multilateral, multi-partner initiative aimed at further developing a framework for research into young people and personal wellbeing in the Global South.

Switzerland’s Fondation Botnar and South Africa’s NRF and Human Sciences Research Council are u’GOOD!? partners.

Research will be conducted in Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Morocco, Romania, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania and Vietnam.

“The youth living in the urban and peri-urban areas of the Global South are faced with unprecedented challenges that impact their relationships with their environment, their beliefs, the people around them, societal structures and their support landscape,” wrote Sharlene Swartz, HSRC sociologist and research lead of u’GOOD!?, in a statement.

These challenges include unemployment, poverty, climate change, poor education and a lack of marketable skills.

Four thematic areas will be examined through the research: livelihoods, mental health, climate change and digitalisation.

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