Prof. Assan Jaye, Professor of Global Health Education and Research Leadership at the Medical Research Council (MRC), The Gambia, has urged African governments to increase domestic funding for health research. He made the appeal at a high-level workshop in Abuja on Pan-African Health and Clinical Trials Data Sharing, organised by the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) in collaboration with MRC Gambia at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the West African Network of Excellence for Tuberculosis, AIDS and Malaria (WANETAM). Jaye noted that despite Africa generating high-quality data on diseases like tuberculosis, malaria and HIV, the continent remains overly dependent on external funding, which threatens long-term sustainability.
"African governments are still reticent in allocating resources for research, and this has been a long-standing issue," Jaye said. He stressed the need to locally fund research to maintain existing infrastructure and expand the Health Data Research Platform for West Africa into a pan-African system. The platform, initially created to combat drug-resistant tuberculosis and malaria, now stores diverse datasets, including HIV mutations and emerging disease patterns. Jaye highlighted ongoing use of Artificial Intelligence in TB diagnosis and clinical data interpretation.
Prof. Toyin Togun of LSHTM described Nigeria as pivotal to regional health efforts due to its population and disease burden, urging full integration into continental data initiatives. He cited poor data quality, lack of standardisation and weak infrastructure as key barriers. Participants are working on an "Abuja Declaration" to formalise data-sharing commitments across 12 West African countries. Prof. Dorothy Yeboah-Manu, Director of the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research, University of Ghana, said existing health data in Africa are often fragmented and underused, calling for greater policymaker awareness to improve research and policy outcomes.
Nigeria's centrality to West Africa's health data ambitions rests not on population size alone, but on whether it can fix its broken data infrastructure. Prof. Toyin Togun's assertion that Nigeria is crucial to any continental effort rings hollow without investment in standardised, secure data systems. If current gaps in quality and storage persist, Nigeria will remain a bottleneck, not a hub. The Abuja Declaration may gather signatures, but without budget lines for data, it will gather dust.
