The African Bioinformatics Institute (360G-Wellcome-315034_Z_24_Z)

We propose to establish an African Bioinformatics Institute (ABI) that will create a well-coordinated federated network of computational biologists and data scientists across Africa. The ABI will directly empower and support multiple African life science and biomedical initiatives that are poised to produce large amounts of valuable data, and thus require access to infrastructure, expertise and training to manage, interpret and distribute those data. The ABI will be a geographically distributed Institute implementing high quality bioinformatics research, training and services, with group leaders from multiple institutions and a centralised leadership and administration. Its governance will ensure both equitable representation of its stakeholders and accountability to its funders. An initial meeting of all stakeholders will seek a consensus on the modalities of its implementation. The ABI will ensure long-term adherence of the African research and public health community to the principles of data quality, governance and sharing established by the H3Africa and DS-I Africa programmes. It will provide a home for collaboration, sharing of data and computational infrastructure and expertise, and development of research projects for African computational biologists.