INNOVATING FOR BETTER HEALTH

This report is part of the multi-year biomedical engineering project entitled “Engineering expertise to improve health outcomes in Africa”, launched in May 2011 by the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA). The project has three broad goals: (a) to build the human capacity in Africa necessary to install, repair, maintain and upgrade medical devices; (b) to promote innovation and stimulate innovation among students and researchers at interested universities capable of supporting and building Africa’s emerging medical devices industry; and (c) to attract women students to engineering. To achieve these goals, the project has helped to craft up-to-date biomedical engineering programmes in support of interested universities, designed and supported five innovation competitions and schools and facilitated regional collaboration among research teams and universities and between universities and industry.