Collaborating for Global Health Security: the New Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention

The Ebola outbreak in 2014 highlighted the threat posed by infectious diseases in an inter-connected world, and revealed the weakness of existing governance arrangements for maintaining global health security. International collaboration must be widened to include ‘new entrants’ in the global health arena, such as China, and it must be deepened to implement global initiatives at the local level, including strengthening health systems in low-income countries. Yet, such collaborations are uncharted territory and pose considerable challenges at the political, institutional and cultural levels. This project investigates how these challenges are being addressed in the new Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, a collaboration between an incumbent global health leader (US), a new entrant (China), the African Union and the WHO Regional Office for Africa. To this end, the project combines international relations research with local and regional expertise on Africa and China.