Infectious diseases such as COVID-19, Ebola, Marburg, and mpox remain major contributors to illness and death across sub-Saharan Africa. Yet many countries still lack the capacity to rapidly mobilise clinical trials and research during outbreak preparedness and response.
ACT-PREP was created to help close this gap by establishing a framework for equitable collaboration between African and European institutions. Working closely with national public health institutes and the Africa CDC, ACT-PREP aims to strengthen disease surveillance and detection and institutionalise research as a critical pillar of outbreak preparedness and response.
Countries across the region face frequent outbreaks of epidemic-prone diseases, constrained health systems, limited surveillance capacity, and few mechanisms for integrating research into outbreak response. However, several countries have already developed strong research and response capacity, providing a foundation that ACT-PREP is designed to build on and share across the network.
The network strengthens partner institutions and the wider research and regulatory ecosystem, embedding training into PhD and postdoctoral programmes to develop the next generation of researchers. It promotes the sharing of expertise, data, resources, and technology across countries; strengthens laboratory and surveillance systems; and applies One Health approaches and AI-supported tools for prediction, detection, and rapid response. These efforts are supported by streamlined regulatory processes to enable the timely deployment of clinical trials.
To institutionalise clinical trial preparedness within national public health systems as part of broader efforts to strengthen outbreak detection and response, with a focus on HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis (TB), and neglected tropical diseases, alongside emerging and re-emerging infections.
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