Members of the Human Heredity and Health in Africa steering committee are meeting in Mauritius over 2 days to discuss the future of the consortium and using the expertise and infrastructure developed. It has been great reuniting with friends across Africa who we have worked with for more than a decade.

We are making good progress on the standard curriculum for pathogen surveillance using NGS at a consultation meeting hosted at the Africa CDC offices in Addis. Thanks to the contributors from the Africa CDC PGIs and other institutions. H3ABioNet

Well done to the NGS Academy team and SANBI for successfully running a 2 week introduction to Bioinformatics for pathogen surveillance. The materials will be made available here: uct-cbio.github.io/ngs-academy/20….

For all those wondering about the next H3ABioNet Introduction to Bioinformatics course, applications for participants are now open, follow the links below!

The call for hosting classrooms for the H3ABioNet Introduction to Bioinformatics (IBT) Course (16 April to 30 July 2024) closes on 06 February, see: h3abionet.org/categories/eve…

The DS-I Africa CC and eLwazi ODSP team are doing a great job at our exhibition booth at the #SFSA2023 in Pretoria. The forum has had interesting sessions on AI for Health, Gene editing and Open Science, among others. A good forum for interaction with different sectors.

We have brought together about 25 people for an H3ABioNet African reference graph/pangenome and T2T hackathon in Cape Town. This week we will work with the HPRC team on long read data to build an African reference.

Dr Sumir Panji kicks off the 'Sustainable Data Analysis Pipelines' morning session at the 3rd DS-I Africa Meeting in Kigali #DSIAfrica

There needs to be closer ties between academia and public health -one of the messages coming out of the Public Health Alliance for Genomic Epidemiology conference in Somerset West this week. An excellent gathering and talks so far.

The H3ABioNet train-the-trainer workshop concluded on Friday, it was a great, enthusiastic group of committed trainers, who will hopefully go forth and run bioinformatics courses in their regions to manage the huge demand.

The H3ABioNet IBT train the trainer course runs this week. We will be training trainers in how to run the remote classroom model to ensure longer term sustainability of training in Africa. eLwazi ODSP

There were some great sessions at the GGC meeting in Dakar yesterday, Meg Whitman, US Ambassador in Kenya coined the term 'Silicon Savannah'. Members of SickleInAfrica highlighted the need for affordable curative therapies for sickle cell disease.

The Gates Grand Challenges meeting in Dakar is underway, with opening talks from Bill Gates and Macky Sall, President of Senegal. There is an interesting panel discussion on African government investment in R&D, how do encourage them to invest more in science which saves lives?

The GA4GH plenary kicked off in San Francisco today. Ewan Birney has done a wonderful job leading the GA4GH in achieving so many useful products for global human data sharing and increasing diverse representation in the alliance.

The GenCoE session at #UNGA78 completed successfully, thanks to all the speakers. I was so moved by the talk from Victoria Gray, the first sickle cell patient to receive life saving gene editing therapy. It reminds us why we need to continue to enable and pursue science.

The GenCoE session kicked off this morning at #UNGA78 in New York with excellent presentations from Prof Binagwaho and Dr Collins emphasizing African leadership, equity and the need for collaboration and capacity development.