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The Minister of Health, Kwabena Mintah Akandoh, has called on data scientists to use their skills to help revolutionise the country’s health system by developing robust data ecosystems.
He said the role of data scientists in managing, analysing and providing interpretation for complex data sets would help the country identify trends, predict outbreaks and tailor interventions effectively.
In a speech read on his behalf, Mr Akandoh said data science techniques such as predictive analytic could help the country identify high risk pregnancies, deliver targeted support, reduce maternal mortality, and apply real time data analysis for disease surveillance.
The minister was speaking at the fifth Data Science for Health Discovery and Innovation in Africa (DS-I) Africa Consortium meeting in Accra.
It was on the theme: “Data science in Africa: Strengthening partnerships and collaboration across networks, sectors and impact areas”.
The meeting was aimed at harnessing the power of data science to solve the continent's health challenges.
The event, which was jointly funded by Wellcome Trust and the National Institute of Health (NIH), brought together researchers, funders, technologists, early-career scientists and public health leaders.
Mr Akandoh further urged policy makers to leverage data science, saying that data driven solutions were a necessity for safeguarding public health, particularly in the country where there were approximately 5,900 direct deaths from antimicrobial resistance (AMR) alone.
He said his outfit had embraced genomic surveillance as a critical tool in combating AMR and implementing wide range of dimensions such as pathogen specific surveillance, environmental surveillance, zoonotic surveillance and community based surveillance.
The minister also said that the country was introducing mobile genetic element tracking to help understand how resistance was spread in urban settings.
“These intensified efforts have yielded significant results that demonstrate that leveraging new technologies such as AI and Big Data to detect and characterise outbreak is indeed a transformative intervention,” he said.
The Pro Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana, Professor Gordon Awandare, said changes in global funding policies had made it imperative for African governments to commit resources to support research that directly addressed urgent health challenges, while incentivising private investment in that regard.
He said intensified advocacy on funding for research had for the first time led to the establishment of a research fund with a mandate to mobilise and disburse funding for research and innovation.
Prof. Awandare added that a DAPP sustain initiative was launched at the African Health Sovereignty summit to complement ongoing efforts by the AU to champion domestic health financing.
“We must all support these laudable ideas and hold our leaders accountable to ensure that these initiatives do not just remain mere political rhetoric as their predecessor declarations which remain unfulfilled,” he said.
The DSI- Africa Steering Committee Chair, Joyce Nabende, said significant progress had been made across various projects within the consortium over the past few months, including research hubs, training hubs and supplement grants.
She said the consortium had an accepted session at the UN Science Summit, focusing on the role of data science and genomics in global health.
In a speech read on his behalf, the Charge d’affaires of the US Embassy, Ghana, Rolf Olson, said the US government, through the NIH, had long partnered African institutions to advance biomedical research capacity and fostered innovation.
He said the partnerships reflected their commitment to strengthening global health security, drive scientific discovery, and build sustainable solutions that would benefit both nations and the world in general.
