Africa Bioinformatics School (Scholarship Tier)

The Africa Bioinformatics School (ABS) is a 60-day online bioinformatics training programme designed for African researchers, clinicians, and students who are generating genomic data and need the computational skills to analyse it independently.

THE PROBLEM WE SOLVE

60% of global infectious disease genomics studies use African samples. Fewer than 12% of first authors are African scientists. African researchers routinely hand over authorship to foreign collaborators in exchange for computational help. The bottleneck is not talent — it is access to training. ABS breaks this cycle permanently.

WHAT WE TEACH

We train participants to analyse their own clinical genomic data in 60 days — entirely in a web browser using Galaxy Africa (africa.usegalaxy.eu), a free platform that works on 3G internet from any African country. No software installation. No server required. Any device.

Phase 1 (Days 1–30): Live instructor-led teaching across 6 modules — NGS genomics, phylogenetics, metagenomics, structural biology, drug discovery, and clinical bioinformatics — using real African datasets: Nigerian TB isolates, Kenyan K. pneumoniae, Ugandan gut microbiome, Tanzanian soil, African SARS-CoV-2.

Phase 2 (Days 31–60): Supervised independent research project on the participant's own data or one of five curated African project tracks. Two mentor sessions. Five milestones. Publication-ready final report. Certificate of completion.

TOOLS TAUGHT

FastQC · BWA-MEM · GATK4 · TB-Profiler · SPAdes · IQ-TREE2 · QIIME2 · Kraken2 · AlphaFold2 · AutoDock Vina · ResFinder · MLST · Mutect2 · GitHub · Zenodo