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Nicola Mulder, Sumir Panji, Munadia Ansarie (University of Cape Town), on behalf of the ABI Core Team

Africa has traditionally lagged behind in biomedical research due to lack of funding, and limited infrastructure and human capacity. H3ABioNet made a significant contribution to developing bioinformatics capacity in Africa over 12 years, but its funding has ended. In 2024, the community received a boost through a commitment from the Wellcome Trust and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to establish an African Bioinformatics Institute (ABI). The ABI will be established as a network of institutions across the continent doing high quality bioinformatics research, providing African databases and resources, offering bioinformatics support and providing continent-wide bioinformatics training and capacity development. The ABI will also work with pan African projects, such as the African Population Cohorts Consortium, national genome projects and public health institutes generating large, complex biological data to solve common challenges related to data governance and benefit sharing, and to develop solutions for data storage, analysis and sharing. The GA4GH has solved many of these challenges by providing standards, guidelines and tools for responsible representation, analysis and sharing of human data. Continuing from the adoption of GA4GH standards in H3Africa and the eLwazi Open data Science Platform, the ABI will promote the use of these standards and tools to facilitate translational human genomics research that has implementations in healthcare. The Institute will coordinate the development of a data infrastructure to support large human genome sequencing projects across multiple African countries, including the roll out of a federated network of trusted research environments. Working with the GA4GH community, the ABI will ensure that human genomics and health data follow global standards and can be shared responsibly to benefit global populations.