African Health Research and Development Agenda

Executive Summary

The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) is a science-based agency of the African Union in charge of safeguarding the health security of the continent. Africa CDC has as mandate to support African Union Member States public health institutions to prevent, detect and respond quickly and effectively to disease threats and outbreaks based on science, policy, and evidence-based interventions and programs. In this process, there is need to coordinate evidence generation to ensure that limited resources are channelled to interventions with the capacity of driving optimal health outcomes.

This can mainly be done through research prioritisation to identify these health problems. Health research prioritisation is a multi-criteria decision-making process that requires the engagement and involvement of numerous stakeholders in a coordinated manner. Moreover, considering there are no universally accepted
criteria for research prioritisation, the criteria involved in the process must be objectively, consensually, meticulously chosen and weighted to ensure buy-in and guarantee that a systematic approach within the same context involving different groups of stakeholders will provide similar results.

As such, the different areas of suggested for Member States support clearly stated in the Africa CDC mandate tremendously guided the identification of these criteria which were then reformulated along the spectrum of health and disease as prevention, detection, morbidity, case management and mortality. With these criteria, an online survey using a One Health approach to health research stakeholders was administered with the primary aim of quantifying how stakeholders consider these criteria to be important for research prioritisation and for developing weighting parameters for each level of attributes of the criteria (low, medium, and high) through a pairwise discrete choice experiment, and conditional logit analysis. With these weightings of levels of attribute of the prioritisation criteria, an online research prioritisation quantitative tool was developed.