African Network for Drugs and Diagnostics Innovation (ANDI) in partnership with United Nations Children’s Fund and other stakeholders invited 50 health experts to Addis Ababa to prioritize mechanisms that will enable sustained health innovation in Africa.
The experts highlighted the critical leadership role of ANDI in African health innovation while proposing the establishment of a sustainable financing mechanism to support local technology development, capacity building and Ebola research and development.
The experts stressed the high impact technologies that can transform healthcare delivery and in particular, seminal African discoveries on Ebola Virus with potential for diagnostics and therapeutics were presented and discussed with emphasis that these programmes require the establishment of a sustainable health technology fund to support their development.
They agreed the new Africa-based fund, equipped with grant making and social venture arms to support the initiative would ensure development, implementation and commercialization of technologies emanating from African Centers of Excellence and other sources.
It will also support partnership building, the operationalization of the African regulatory harmonization activities, and promote local research into Ebola and other emergent infectious diseases, and it was noted that establishment of incubators and engagement with the private sector will be pivotal for realizing this ambition.
Executive Director of ANDI, Dr. Solomon Nwaka said that the conference had been extraordinary and “the technologies discussed at this meeting demonstrate the health innovation potential existing within the African continent.
Guardian reported that with the establishment of the right enablers such as a sustainable financing mechanism, African research and development institutions and entrepreneurs will be able to collaborate in order to solve the health challenges of the continent and contribute to development.
“The development of innovation capacity in developing and emerging economies has been my passion for many years. I am pleased to see the momentum around ANDI after the initial transitional challenges it faced last year,” said Nwaka.
