The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) have launched a Health Security Partnership to Strengthen Disease Surveillance and Epidemic Intelligence in Africa.

The partnership aims to strengthen Africa’s health security capabilities in the areas of biosecurity, integrated disease surveillance, event-based surveillance, genomic surveillance, and epidemic intelligence.

The partnership seeks to encourage strong country leadership. The first phase will be implemented in six African Union Member States including The Gambia, Mali, Morocco, Namibia, Tunisia, and South Africa and will later be expanded to additional countries.

Strengthened disease surveillance is a foundational requirement for health security. Substantial progress has been made in disease surveillance across Africa over the past decade, but it is worth noting that it experiences more outbreaks and other health emergencies than others, many of which are preventable or controllable with proven public health interventions.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the critical role of the public health laboratory in surveillance as well as the necessity for advancements in data collection, management, reporting, and dissemination to ensure evidence-based policy making during health security emergencies.

In response, the Health Security Partnership in Africa works to improve integrated disease surveillance capabilities across the continent in order to better detect, confirm, and notify health security threats.