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Africa Against Antimicrobial Resistance

Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) is the resistance of microbes such as bacteria to our antibiotics. It is an emerging phenomenon across the globe, and not well tracked. This online and local community is creating challenges, grants and programmes to counteract this phenomenon and track it in Africa.

Over the past decade, Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) has become a major global development issue, threatening environmental, veterinary, and human health. Antibiotics are potent tools against bacterial infections, however microorganisms previously known to be sensitive to some antimicrobial agents are developing partial to complete resistance against them. This can be combated using traditional academic techniques and is already being researched by many labs across the world, however global health and research capacity is not uniform. Development of systems, more open to medical labs and community labs, where universities are less concentrated is essential. This capacity can be granted through proper application of open science, and connection of these communities online, such as that of our project. We aim to develop open and taught materials and a database for tracking of AMR by the international community sustainably. Then use this model to scale up community lab capacity and independence.

Open science is a global movement that aims to make scientific research and its findings accessible to the general public. Its collaborative and participatory ethos presents an opportunity for a bottom-up approach to research and development that is beneficial to the public. It embraces digital technologies to build communities, work processes, and tools, while embracing frugal innovation achieving significant results with minimal resources. We have already achieved this, through a global program to great effect with minimal funding during the COVID19 pandemic with OpenCOVID19, we can repeat this on AMR to create a grass roots AMR surveillance community.