In October of 2018, as part of the Grand Challenges Annual Meeting (GCAM) in Berlin, Germany the AAS presented the pilot inventory mapping, and heard from various teams and organizations that are carrying out clinical trials/capacity building in Africa.

A key outcome of the GCAM Berlin meeting was a recommendation that AAS, working with partners in Africa and globally, move forward to build a versatile, comprehensive, transparent and accessible database to provide real-time visibility of African clinical trials sites and their capabilities, to improve findability for potential collaborations across the product development ecosystem.

The result is the Clinical Trials Community (CTC) online platform a project run by the Alliance for Accelerating Excellence in Science in Africa (AESA) a funding, agenda-setting, programme management initiative of the African Academy of Sciences (AAS) in partnership with the African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD) founding and funding global partners, and through a resolution of the summit of African Union Heads of Governments. CTC is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 

The Clinical Trials Community (CTC) programme’s goal is to increase the level of clinical trial investments in Africa by increasing the visibility of the African clinical trialists and sites and making transparent and accessible individual country regulatory and ethics procedures to inform decision making by sponsors and funders.

Objectives

 Key objectives of the programme include:

Meeting User Needs:
Key platform features were informed by stakeholder engagement meetings held across the continent. Key stakeholders include;

• African clinical trial scientists and researchers,
• Biopharmaceutical sponsors,
• Product development partners (PDPs)
• African Regulatory and Ethics representatives
• Clinical Research Organizations
• Community participants

Key Activities

The CTC team adopted the agile methodology (one sentence explaining the agile method?) in the development of the platform. As such, iterations will continue to be made guided by feedback provided by users. Additional new features will also be added to improve the current version.

Stakeholder Engagement, Needs Assessment and User requirements gathering

CTC hosted seven consultative workshops for scientists, international clinical researchers, biopharma representatives, product development partners (PDPs), and African regulatory representatives across the continent to gather the user requirements. Stakeholder engagement has also been key to get buy-in and to establish the structure and format of this collaborative platform.

The meetings were conducted across the continent as shown in the below:

Upcoming activities