Synapse - Africa’s 4IR Trade & Innovation Magazine - 2nd Quarter 2021 Issue 12

Page 48

NEWS

AU, AFRICA CDC TURN TO 4D PARTNERSHIP

to tackle COVID-19 through AI, Big Data The African Union’s (AU) and Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) in May during a virtual meeting on initiatives to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic unveiled the 4D Partnership.

I

n a joint statement, the AU and Africa CDC described the 4D Partnership as a platform for multi-disciplinary, multi-dimensional, multi-departmental and multi-directional collaboration in Africa, powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), big data and home-grown innovation. The 4D Partnership is a collaboration of several AU organs including the Commission’s Department of Education, Science, Technology & Innovation; the Department of Agriculture, Rural Development, Blue Economy & Sustainable Environment; the Department of Economic Development, Trade, Industry & Mining; the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Secretariat; and the Africa CDC. The platform will strengthen harmonisation of use cases in health,

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SYNAPSE | 2ND QUARTER 2021

research, education, climate response and trade, for example, the Africa CDC’s Trusted Travel and Trusted Vaccines platforms. Other programs, such the Africa Pathogen Genomics Initiative (Africa PGI), will benefit from the multi-stakeholder networks of the AU Science and Technology Framework, and help to accelerate integrated diagnostic, socioeconomic, immunological and genomic data streams to better analyse patterns of disease mutations and variants spread in Africa. The 4D partnership will also speed up the emergence of electronic exchanges in the areas of climate finance, municipal green bonds, common fisheries rights, among others, enriching the quality of the postpandemic recovery already underway in parts of Africa. The coalition behind the 4D partnership includes AfroChampions, the African Academy of Sciences, the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences, the PanaBIOS Consortium, the African Organisation of Standards, Koldchain BioCordon and the United Nations Development Program. The Chair of the African Union, H.E. Félix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo, President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, said: “The 4D Partnership is an early dividend of the recent reforms of the African Union Commission to better synergise its offerings and deliver clear impact for member states; and by leveraging the response to the pandemic to push innovation, it

is going to be a critical part of how we build resilience in Africa against future catastrophes.” The Secretary General of the AfCFTA, H.E. Wamkele Mene, said: “Integrating a continent as vast, diverse, and rich in heritage, as Africa requires an ‘every tool in the toolkit’ approach yet resources are limited, hence the need to transform action-taking in Africa using the tools the 4D platform shall make available to key stakeholders across the continent.” Africa CDC director Dr John Nkengasong pointed out that the pandemic had proven “quiet resilient to our usual responses”. “It is clearly time for a complete step-change in how we think about the recovery. 4D is how Africa’s continental leadership demonstrates its equality to the task,” he added. Assistant Administrator and Director of the UNDP Regional Bureau for Africa, Ms. Ahunna Eziakonwa, said: “We take the opportunity given us to support Africa’s home-grown solutions and strategies very seriously and with a deep sense of commitment. As UNDP continues to play its technical lead role on the socioeconomic response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we will deepen our partnership with the AU and other key stakeholders, to advance transformative digital solutions that allow Africa to move beyond recovery, towards the 2030, sustainable development agenda.”


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Articles inside

RPA: The Next Chapter In The Automation Story

4min
page 29

WizzPass Workspace Booking - Optimise & streamline your workspace management

3min
page 55

Invisio AI Scoops 3rd Place at 2020 SAB Foundation Social Innovation & Disability Empowerment Awards

2min
page 54

AI GONE GLOBAL: Why 20,000+ Developers from Emerging Markets Signed Up for GTC

3min
page 50

Nigerian insurtech startup Curacel raises $450k pre-seed round

1min
page 40

Clevva joins Blue Prism's Digital Exchange

2min
page 40

Smart Africa, Intel partner to build AI capacity building for African policymakers

1min
page 33

WITS, partners release AI-powered Algorithm To Detect SA’s Third COVID-19 Infection Wave

2min
page 32

UNESCO launches AI Needs Assessment Survey in Africa

3min
page 31

UMOJAHACK AFRICA 2021: Over 1 000 students participate in Africa’s largest inter-university hackathon

3min
page 30

ISHANGO, AIMS partnership to connect top African data scientists with international work experiences

2min
page 28

Liquid Telecom rebrands to Liquid Intelligent Technologies

1min
page 28

FROM GARAGE TO GLOBAL: How CompariSure’s conversational AI is driving digitisation within the Insurance industry

3min
pages 26-27

5 Steps To Building A People Analytics Function From The Ground Up

4min
page 25

Willis Re Launches new South Africa Hail Catastrophe Risk Model

3min
page 24

PUTTING AI INTO THE ENGINE ROOM

5min
page 23

First Fon to French Neural Machine Translation Engine launched

1min
page 16

TunBERT: InstaDeep, iCompass announce partnership on 1st AI-based Tunisian Dialect System

2min
page 16

Grassroots NLP community Masakhane wins Wikimedia Foundation Research of the Year Award

1min
page 6

How IBM Wants to Accelerate DX With Latest Breakthroughs in Hybrid Cloud, AI Capabilities

6min
pages 52-53

How the AU, Africa CDC will take On COVID-19 Through AI, Big Data

2min
page 48

DeepMind Establishes Scholarship for Wits Masters Students

2min
pages 49-50

Innovation Factory (Africa) Challenge

1min
page 51

Machine Learning Sandcastles

12min
pages 42-45

Automation 360: Automation Anywhere’s Cloud-Native Platform for Intelligent Automation

4min
pages 46-47

4 Reasons Why You Should Care About AI Governance Now

4min
page 41

Wits Announces Team to Advance AI Research in Africa

3min
page 39

SANRAL explores Machine Learning Applications for Road Safety, Congestion

2min
page 34

Siemens, CSIR partner to boost SA 4IR skills

2min
page 38

Strathmore Study Lays Bare Gender Inequality in African AI Industry

2min
page 35

How Quantum Computing Could Propel Us Light Years Into The Future

4min
pages 36-37

NVIDIA unveils its 1st Data Centre CPU

2min
page 22

NVIDIA Inception: Meet the African Startups Accepted Into the Programme

1min
page 33

How The Pandemic Gave Birth to SA’s latest 4IR SaaS platform

10min
pages 20-21

Meet UCT’s 1st Google Research Scholar Program Recipients

4min
pages 18-19

SA Team Places 2nd at 2021 Imagine Cup Junior Virtual AI Hackathon, Girls Edition

3min
page 17

These 3 African Startups Are Using AI, Data Science to Disrupt Fintech

1min
page 12

Why Kenya’s Ajua acquired AI/ ML fintech startup WayaWaya

3min
page 13

All You Need To Know About The EU’s DIGILOGIC initiative

5min
pages 8-9

Lacuna Fund invests $1m in Datasets for Low Resource African Languages

11min
pages 14-15

Human In The System: Understanding Customer Behaviours with ecosystem.Ai

3min
pages 10-11

Hyperautomation: A Case Study

3min
page 7

AfDB provides $1m Grant for AI-based National Consumer Management Systems

1min
page 6
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