The collaboration within African researchers is a very crucial issue. Since 2009, Prof. Bassirou Bonfoh, the current director of the Centre Suisse de Recherches Scientifiques en Côte d’Ivoire (CSRS) joined forces with 10 other African institutions to collaborate on research into infections that pass between animals and humans through the research consortium ‘Afrique One’. This consortium was fully funded by the Wellcome Trust under its African Institutions Initiative (AII). The collaboration enabled to access data from as far afield as Tanzania and extend his remit to rift valley fever, an infection that has had several outbreaks since its first detection in 1931. Click here to know more ► http://on.ft.com/1Yi3AC1

One of the great benefit of the intra African collaboration is the non-duplication of research. The experience of Afrique One continue to be followed by several African research projects. On the 5^th of May 2017, during the Kick off meeting of the project named ‘Supporting Evidence Based Interventions (SEBI)’, Dr Katharina Kreppel, The East-Africa Post-Doctoral Training Fellow of Afrique One-ASPIRE, the second phase of the Afrique One initiative, was invited to give a communication on the topic ‘Introduction of the Afrique One-ASPIRE program and its framework’. It was an occasion to show the achievements carried out by Afrique One during the past six years and the challenges that Afrique One-ASPIRE want to address for the five next years to come namely the zoonotic diseases through the One Health approach.

The meeting was organized by the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (NM-AIST) and the University of Glasgow, two institutions involved in Afrique One-ASPIRE. The audience was composed of government officials, independent research institutions and scientists. The key message emerged of the meeting is to ‘work together on One-Health across ministries in Tanzania’.

Afrique One-ASPIRE is one of the eleven DELTAS Africa grantee, an independent funding scheme of the African Academy of Sciences (AAS)’s Alliance for Accelerating Excellence in Science in Africa (AESA) and supported by the New Partnership for Africa’s Development Planning and Coordinating Agency (NEPAD Agency) with funding from the Wellcome Trust and the UK government. Two Afrique One-ASPIRE fellows are involved in the SEBI project.