Research by Wolfson JRF finds urgent need for Africa-led research collaboration on medicine quality

A new paper co-authored by Wolfson Junior Research Fellow Dr. Fenqi Zang finds that the research on substandard and falsified medicines, predominantly led by institutions in the Global North, is a threat to African health systems.

Most research on African medicine quality focuses on single countries, with limited regional collaboration. The authors argue that it is critical to increase Africa-led, cross-national research in order to solve the “hidden crisis” of substandard and falsified medicines. Due to underfunding, an uneven evidence base, and research fragmentation, there are significant gaps in the research, which presents a challenge for African regulators unable to make data-driven policy decisions.

Dr. Zang and his co-authors make five recommendations to build African-led research capacity:

• Establish dedicated funding mechanisms for Africa-led, cross-national medicine quality research; measuring success by the share of projects led by African principal investigators.
• Create incentives for South-South collaboration requiring co-leadership across African institutions.
• Support open-access data platforms and regional knowledge hubs for real-time sharing of sampling data, lab analyses, and regulatory alerts, with the African Medicines Agency piloting a shared laboratory repository.
• Integrate research functions into national regulatory agencies through formal university partnerships.
• Develop robust evaluation frameworks that assess social, economic, and supply chain drivers of substandard medicines.

Dr Fanqi Zeng is a UKRI Early Career Fellow in the Department of Sociology, a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute and a Research Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford. His research bridges AI and the social sciences, harnessing computational methods and large-scale data to illuminate patterns within complex societal and natural systems. His current work explores the transformative impact of AI on society and human behaviour. He has been awarded academic funding from UKRI and the John Fell Fund.

Read more about the paper here.