Africa Bioethics Network

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Coordinator: Mercury Shitindo

                       Executive Director, Africa Bioethics Network

Email: mshitindo@africabioethicsnetwork.org

About the Network

The Africa Bioethics Network (ABN) is a pan-African platform dedicated to strengthening ethical governance across research, health systems, and emerging technologies. Headquartered in Kenya, ABN serves a growing community spanning over 40 African countries.

ABN positions ethics as infrastructure, extending beyond compliance to support governance across the full research lifecycle. Its work integrates African ethical frameworks, including relational and communitarian approaches, into both continental practice and global bioethics discourse.

Increasingly, ABN functions as a living continental infrastructure, supporting coordination across researchers, institutions, and policy spaces, while contributing to how ethical systems are shaped across Africa and globally.

Network Goals

• Strengthen research ethics systems and governance capacity across Africa
• Advance contextually grounded ethical frameworks in health, science, and technology
• Support early-career bioethicists through training, mentorship, and collaborative platforms
• Promote equitable participation of African researchers in global knowledge production
• Contribute to global governance discussions on ethics, data, and research systems

Key Activities and Ongoing Work

Training & Capacity Building: Contemporary Bioethics Training Programme; BEACON Mentorship Programme; Peer Reviewer and Editorial Capacity initiatives

Scholarly Publishing: African Journal of Bioethics (AJB), a diamond open-access journal supporting inclusive and multilingual scholarship

Research & Framework Development: Development and validation of ethical frameworks for environmentally sustainable data-driven health research, including continental workshops with multi-country stakeholders

Global Governance Engagement: Active contributions to international ethics and research governance platforms, including WHO processes, global research integrity initiatives, and data governance discussions

Community & Thematic Platforms: Working Groups and dialogues across key areas including AI ethics, climate ethics, genomics, and mental health

Additional Contributions:  ABN is part of the Steering Committee for the 2026 World Congress of Bioethics and is developing continental convening platforms, including its inaugural Annual Conference, scheduled for November 2026 in Nairobi, Kenya.

Website and Links

Website: www.africabioethicsnetwork.org

African Journal of Bioethics (AJB): www.africanjournalofbioethics.org

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/africa-bioethics-network

Last updated on May 13, 2026