STELLENBOSCH - Biotechnology specialists stress that research with a real-world impact is key to the field.
A science capacity-building programme is underway between two leading bio-health research institutions on the continent.
Fifty researchers from 20 African countries are part of the African STARS Fellowship Programme, which kicks off next month.
Strengthening scientific research capacity in genomics, diagnostics, vaccine design and biotechnology entrepreneurship is a key focus area for the African STARS Fellowship Programme.
Participants say the initiative equips them with the skills to respond to any public health problem across the continent.
YPP Fellow Harries Molepo said some people do not have proper access to healthcare facilities.
“Living in a continent like Africa where the health system is normally fragmented, from my own personal experiences having a grandmother who grew up in the rural areas who didn’t have access to the best healthcare, always having to travel to the city, it’s a way that we are able to bring the best healthcare to the people who need it the most in the most isolated places.”
Other priorities include training scientists on how to respond to and manage disease outbreaks.
Richard Gordon from the South African Medical Research Council said there were a couple of things behind it.
“The first one is really being able to translate our own research into products and sustainable businesses. There is a gap, there is a clear gap where there are lots of great training programmes in Africa but not as many of them translate into scale and job creation and sustainability, and that’s what we’re really trying to achieve.”
Fezokuhle Khumalo, a researcher and African Stars Fellow, said Africans problems need African solutions.
“Africa actually has a greater burden of disease because many of the diseases globally are concentrated on the African continent. In numbers, Africans are dying a bit more, and so we can’t afford to wait for solutions to come from external parts of the globe to our African problems.
“The other thing is that other problems are African-centred and what better way to solve them than to get African solutions, on the ground, frontline, creating the solutions.”
Clinical Microbiologist, Joel Kabugo said: “Collaboration between Uganda and South Africa, specifically Stellenbosch University – CERI – has put me at the frontline to coordinate this and also to be in the limelight of making sure that there is a flow of technology and also that there continuation of data and information, so that is what I’ve been heavily involved in.”