Challenges of research in Africas healthcare systems

By improving the education systems, countries can provide qualified health personnel, equipped with the right knowledge to fight perennial diseases that afflict the continent, writes Dr Kizito Lubano

The African continent’s healthcare system remains the worst healthcare structure in the world. Most countries have poor quality healthcare and substandard health education services.

This calls for improved innovative technology to help strengthen health systems in Africa. Apart from just improving the health care system, there is need of developing new generation of drugs that can cure most of the old and emerging diseases are still a serious threat in sub-Sahara.

Developing a new drug is not an easy task. It requires resources such as human, financial and material. Due to high cost of drug research, most African countries rely on drugs that are being developed in developed countries.

Recently, East African Community countries started working on ways to manufacture drugs domestically with a view of improving their health care system and to make drugs affordable.

But due to limited resources of these countries, the minimum standards for conducting research on new drugs are sometimes not met. In addition, there is the challenge of conducting clinical trials, which requires the care for subjects in the trials if the region is to meet the set global standard requirements.

Disease challenges

HIV and Aids, tuberculosis, and malaria are some of the most challenging diseases that face most of African countries today. The fight against HIV is taking most of the little resources that are available in developing countries, making it difficult for most countries to convert their resources into sustainable development. 

Other diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, respiratory and nutrition-related diseases, still contribute to the high death rate in the continent. All these diseases have a serious effect on the wellbeing and labour production in most of African countries. 

There are also some parasitic diseases that infect both human and the livestock. It affects most economies making sustainable development almost impossible.

The healthcare system is one of the sectors that is affected negatively and because of that, the standards of biomedical research and care are very low.

Due to the limited resources, it is very difficult for most of African developing countries to invest in drug development research and clinical trials. This raises the question of how to help these countries improve their healthcare system, develop drug development research units and clinical trials researches.

How to improve drug development and clinical trials in Africa

Since most of African countries have limited resources, there are many ways to improve their biomedical research and clinical trials:

•     Develop cooperation between several countries.

•     Develop cooperation between developing countries and developed countries.

•     Improve biomedical Sciences education system in developing countries.

•     Address cultural issues and help establish community acceptability of data collection methods.

Development of cooperation

Biomedical research requires a lot of resources. It requires human resources, financial resources and equipment. Therefore, the establishment of research cooperation between African countries should be one of the priorities of all government’s programmes. For instance, countries can put their resources together in order to build world-class research institutes, or build world-class hospitals.

Cooperate with developed countries

Developing countries have very limited resources, making it difficult to conduct high quality clinical trials. Apart from putting their resources together, countries should establish collaboration with developed countries in order to benefit from their experiences and resources. Other collaborations need to be established not only in clinical trials, but also in biomedical research and research personal training.