Kristi Pelzel is a contributor to Today News Africa in Washington D.C. Kristi focuses on the US Department of State and the United Nations. She holds a master’s degree from Georgetown University.
The African continent is making another leap in technological innovation, and this time in health care, going from clinics with little more than a stethoscope to full-fledged genome sequencing laboratories.
In the last decade, countries like Uganda and Kenya have made great strides in establishing e-health programs and infrastructure. These initiatives have primarily been made possible through foreign aid and investment, but some countries are now starting to develop their own indigenous capability.
One such country is Rwanda, which in 2015 established the world’s first fully-fledged genome sequencing laboratory. The Kigali lab is part of the Rwanda Biomedical Centre (RBC) and is equipped with state-of-the-art technology, including next-generation sequencing (NGS) machines.
