VODAN-Africa Celebrates the GO FAIR Approach Working Across 88 facilities in 8 African Countries to Combat Covid-19 and Future Outbreaks
On April 20th, the innovations of African scientists were on display through the tremendously successful project, the Virus Outbreak Data Network (VODAN) Africa. VODAN Africa alongside Kampala International University (KIU), Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), , Network Globalization, Accessibility, Innovation and Care (GAIC), Stanford University Center for Expanded Data Annotation and Retrieval (CEDAR), and San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) hosted a hybrid event online and in Leiden, the Netherlands. The event was co-moderated by Dr. Mirjam van Reisen, Professor of FAIR Data Science at LUMC and the Global Coordinator of VODAN-Africa and GO FAIR US’s Christine Kirkpatrick. The event recording and slides are available.
VODAN Africa Executive Coordinator , Professor Francisca Oladipo
The “FAIR Ethical Patient Data Records Deployment in Health Facilities in Africa” event welcomed speakers from across the world to discuss the status of VODAN-Africa’s infrastructure as well as what the accomplishments meant for the broader ecosystem. The event was opened by the Honorable President Fortune Charumbira, The president of the Pan African Parliament to the African Union. He lauded the initiative for establishing an ethical way to collect data and to leave it in place in the African countries that own the data. He went on to say, “Africa has suffered greatly under the COVID pandemic [and they] were not given much attention because the data is not available. This innovative health architecture, developed by African scientists, may become a model for the world to follow.” He closed with, “Africa should set the terms of what a digital society looks like. Data should be owned where it is produced: in Africa.” The VODAN-Africa project has implemented the 3-point FAIRification system promoted by GO FAIR that includes 1. Metadata for Machines (M4M) workshops to train data stewards and create metadata plans for data collection; 2. FAIR Implementation Profiles (FIP) documented as one of the M4M outputs and data quality enforced with the use of CEDAR templates; and metadata about the data collected, summary data, or other open data shared via FAIR Data Points (FDP). VODAN-Africa partners presented work to date, much of which will be reported in an upcoming special issue of the Data Intelligence journal. One of the last session blocks included two members from the Tigray region, presented by Dr. Hagos from Ethiopia’s Bureau of Health and Dr. Amanuel, the Chief Medical Officer for Ayder Hospital in Ethiopia. Despite the dire conditions amidst a backdrop of war that include no internet, no transportation system, and being the only remaining functional hospital in their region left to support a population of 9 million people, the Ayder Hospital has deployed a FAIR Data Point and is collecting data. Dr. Amanuel highlighted the role of FAIR data to help inform decisions and priorities that relate to very meager resources; there is no room for waste. Indeed, the staff of 3,600 has not been paid in over 10 months. Alongside its accomplishment to join the VODAN-Africa network as a data facility, the hospital has resumed taking part in clinical trials, and launched an undergraduate program in Health Informatics. Kirkpatrick closed the event with the thought that, “VODAN-Africa has done what others have only dreamed of - including during the most challenging of circumstances - pandemic, regional tensions, infrastructure and internet issues. The world’s eyes are on the innovations of Africa.”
VODAN Chair of Implementation Network, Professor Dr. Mouhamad Mpezamihigo
If you are interested in engaging with the VODAN-Africa partners, you may wish to attend the May 30, 2022 event, “Global Impact in Health Symposium” taking place online and in Leiden. Prof. Dr. van Reisen will give the talk, “Fighting Covid-19 with FAIR Data”.
