This contributor piece by Chinaza Esiaba was first published on TechCabal Insights.
For years, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in Africa has been described through increasingly stark numbers. AMR happens when bacteria and other microbes evolve to resist the drugs used to treat them, making common infections harder to cure and, in some cases, untreatable. A Lancet analysis estimated that western sub-Saharan Africa had the world’s highest death rate attributable to bacterial AMR in 2019: 27.3 deaths per 100,000 people. The figures establish the scale of the threat. They also expose a paradox: where resistant infections are a serious concern, the laboratory evidence needed to track them is often scarce.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that one in five laboratory-confirmed bacterial infections in its African Region in 2023 was resistant to antibiotics. That estimate cannot capture infections that are never tested. The visibility gap extends beyond Africa. 48% of countries did not report resistance data to the WHO’s Global Antimicrobial Resistance and Use Surveillance System (GLASS) in 2023, and about half of those that reported lacked systems to produce reliable data.
This is a public health challenge with a health tech dimension. AI diagnostics and prescribing tools depend on laboratories that can test infections, records that link results to patients, and surveillance systems that turn individual tests into evidence about local resistance. For governments and investors, building those connections may be the more immediate opportunity.
Originally published by TechCabal.