Africa Group
African member-state bloc negotiating the WHO pandemic treaty pathogen-sharing annex.
Last refreshed: 21 July 2026
Background
The Africa Group is the African Union's negotiating bloc within the World Health Organization's Pandemic Agreement talks, representing the continent's shared position on the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) annex. At IGWG7 in Geneva, the bloc, represented by Algeria, argued for a federated model of distributed national and regional laboratories under binding access conditionalities, against a rival hybrid model backed by the EU and other industrialised states built on more centralised infrastructure and looser access.
The bloc's position traces to COVID-19: African states shared pathogen samples and sequence data under existing WHO mechanisms but waited FAR longer than wealthier countries for vaccines, a grievance that has shaped African negotiating positions across the INB and IGWG processes since 2022. The Africa Group argues that only binding conditionalities, rather than voluntary commitments, can prevent a repeat of that access gap during the next pandemic.
The Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in DR Congo has given the Africa Group's case concrete force: DRC is sharing outbreak sequence data in real time with no treaty-guaranteed right to resulting vaccines, the exact scenario the bloc says PABS must foreclose. With IGWG7 closing on 17 July without an agreed text, the bloc's federated model remains the central African counter-proposal heading into IGWG8 in September 2026.