The African Academy of Sciences (AAS) is a non-aligned, non-political, not-for-profit pan African organisation. The AAS’ vision is to see transformed lives on the African continent through science. Our tripartite mandate is recognising excellence through the AAS’ highly prestigious fellowship and award schemes, providing advisory and think tank functions for shaping Africa’s Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) strategies and policies, and implementing key STI programmes addressing Africa’s developmental challenges through our agenda setting, funding and programme implementation platform, the Alliance for Accelerating Excellence in Science in Africa’s (AESA’s)
Reasons why women’s voices are ignored in science reporting range from socio-cultural influences that inform gender norms, to perceptions of leadership and political power structures.
Thanks to major science infrastructure, human resource training and education investment in African nations, the continent is well placed to lead from the front.
Some of the priorities were drawn from the World Health Organisation’s Roadmap; others were expressed by researchers in and from Africa as being important to the continent’s many contexts.
More countries on the African continent must urgently get involved in clinical trials so that the data collected will accurately represent the continent at a genetic level.
There are a number of stumbling blocks to intra African collaboration. These must be addressed to ensure that research is not duplicated and that findings are shared.