Synthesising Perspectives on Advancing Health Innovations in Africa

It is undeniable that ensuring good health and wellbeing is a central piece of the developmental puzzle. National health policies and international schemes, like the Africa Union’s Agenda 2063 and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), capture this aspiration. However, more work needs to ensure citizens across many African countries are healthy and well, so that they can enjoy life and contribute meaningfully towards the Africa we want. Innovation could play a transformative role in addressing specific issues while strengthening health systems through multi-stakeholder, cross-sectoral, and interdisciplinary approaches. Why is health innovation important in the African context? What are the unique challenges faced by the health sector on the continent? Are there topics or levels of intervention (policy, community, health facilities, research, etc) which should be prioritised? How can we best support health innovation in Africa? Where are the opportunities for health innovators on the continent?

To answer these questions, the ‘Enabling Health Innovations in Africa’ chat brought together three experts to discuss health innovation in Africa and identify strategies that can help to grow the ecosystem. The speakers were Dr Yaw Bediako from Yemaachi Biotechnology Limited and the West African Centre for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens (WACCBIP), Dr Watu Wamae from the Africa Oxford Initiative (AfOX) and Thomas Landrain from Just One Giant Lab (JOGL). The chat was moderated by Gameli Adzaho, also from JOGL. We were joined by about 30 participants including researchers, innovators, and health professionals in Africa and beyond. The conversation was very engaging with many insightful points from the three panellists. This write-up seeks to summarise some of the key learnings from the panel.

Why health innovation is important in Africa

Dr Watu Wamae recognised the ‘huge explosion of talents in Africa’, which makes it possible for people to come up with new ways to tackle challenges, giving solutions to disease prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and strengthening systems, among other goals. The panel recognised Africa’s unique opportunities and challenges, which makes it crucial to push home-grown and home-driven research and innovation.

The resource gap constrains health innovation in Africa

Of the key challenges bedevilling health innovation on the continent, lack of dedicated resources and infrastructure stood out as the most pressing. According to Dr Yaw Bediako, ‘Africa doesn’t lack talent or ideas, it lacks resources to enable these.’ Thomas Landrain weighed in by adding that it can also be hard to find the path to access the resources that do exist, asking ‘ how do we create more interfaces between the opportunities and the actors that want to innovate? Other challenges that were identified include lack of technical capacity in certain specialised areas and the absence of a supportive ecosystem for innovation. Clearly, an agile, open, and participatory approach to innovation could help to surmount some of the identified barriers and lead to new solutions.

Interventions must be multi-sectoral and integrated

One of the key viewpoints emphasised throughout the discussion was the importance of connecting people to facilitate partnerships, interdisciplinary thinking, and concerted action. According to Watu, ‘this is so important because ideas and feedback loops come from people meeting, from alliances that recognise the need for knowledge exchange. It’s about bringing minds together to crack challenges, reconfiguring knowledge.’ On global collaboration she opined that ‘our explosion of talent is spanning industries. We are not in isolation in Africa. Issues of climate change and pandemics are global. They require global collaboration.’

This brings home the point that global communities and platforms, which leverage the internet and open technologies, are very relevant in fostering collaborations to drive innovations addressing local and global challenges. Thomas shared how JOGL is empowering innovators around the world, including in Africa, to derive solutions to diagnostics, infection prevention, modelling, etc in response to the COVID-19 pandemic through the OpenCovid19 initiative. Similar models could be applied to great effect in the African context.

Sharing on the Africa Oxford Initiative’s African Health Innovation Platform, Watu mentioned that the programme was keen on enabling specific connections, allowing for context specific solutions developed by local communities, to be enhanced by basic principles found worldwide. Clearly, this exchange of ideas, together with mentoring and funding, are crucial to drive projects successfully from research to commercialisation. ‘Our innovation platform is about connectivity and creating space for skills building together’, she said.

Panellists on the call agreed that the multi-pronged nature of problems in the health sector on the continent implied that interventions addressing policy, research, implementation, and communication gaps are needed in tandem. Yaw spoke about the danger of going for easy fix solutions: ‘we need to stop just scratching the surface, or focus on cost effectiveness, stop band-aid solutions and start having long term impact. Go for the fruit at the top of the tree — not the easy, low-hanging fruit.’

The point was made that innovation goes beyond just creating apps, but there is scope to do more along the health value chain, including instrumentation, diagnostics, treatment, vaccines, etc.

Education, mentorship, and support are key to enabling health innovations in Africa

The panel reflected on the importance of capacity building and systematic support in enabling health innovations on the continent. Some of the key points highlighted in this direction include:

• Scientists are generally not trained to be entrepreneurs, and this is a global problem
• Science should not be viewed as simply an academic exercise, but as a path to entrepreneurship
• We need to start teaching innovation on top of science. If we don’t start doing this, the brain drain will continue and our young innovators will continue leaving and innovating in America.
• We need to grow the private innovation arm for health innovation almost separately from academia, yet create a connected ecosystem where these worlds feed each other

Yaw shared about Yemaachi Biotech’s plans to raise investment to do research that will ultimately have applicability. ‘We want to attract overseas investment for science, not development.’

Opportunities for health innovators

To round up the chat, the panellists shared valuable opportunities open to young innovators from their initiatives. Yaw spoke about WACCBIP’s postgraduate training programmes in cell and molecular biology, and graduate internship opportunities. He also spoke about future internship opportunities for students interested in biotechnology and cancer research at Yemaachi.

Watu mentioned that the Africa Health Innovation Platform, led by AfOx, is currently accepting applications, and directed participants to check it out and apply.

Thomas invited all open source innovators to visit JOGL and create their projects on the platform in order to connect and collaborate with a global community. He also mentioned the fifth OpenCovid19 grant round which was active at the time of the call.

Another opportunity shared by one of the attendees is Health Innovation in a Virtual Environments (HiVE), a project from Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM), targeting academics and clinicians, implemented by the African Health Innovation Centre (AHIC) and other partners.

Lingering questions

While the conversation was thoroughly engaging and insightful, there wasn’t enough time to explore all the questions posed by the attendees. Two of the outstanding questions were:

• Is there something about the structuring of “national” healthcare services in Africa that becomes a barrier or limiting influence for entrepreneurs and/or researchers?
• What is the general sense of the state of system resiliency as it pertains to healthcare? Not just the infrastructure question but more to where potential areas to direct interest for improved resiliency via innovation.

Clearly, more conversations like this are needed to unpack what needs to go into enabling health innovation in Africa. Beyond this, the real work must be put in to address infrastructure and funding deficits, building communities of practice, integrating research into the innovation pipeline, strengthening technical capacity, and supporting rapid prototyping of solutions.