ARILAC

ARILAC (Advancing Regional Integrated Laboratory Capacity for AMR Control) is a four-year public health programme launched on 6 May 2026 in Addis Ababa by Africa CDC, the African Society for Laboratory Medicine (ASLM), and the European Union through the Team Europe Initiative on Sustainable Health Security. The programme targets 8 African Union member states: Cameroon, Chad, Ethiopia, Gabon, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. Its objective is to build functional AMR (antimicrobial resistance) surveillance laboratory capacity on a One Health basis, integrating human and animal health diagnostics. The baseline that prompted its creation: of more than 50,000 assessed medical laboratories across 14 African countries, only 1.3% conduct routine AMR testing, leaving roughly 261 million people without access to AMR diagnostics.

ARILAC was launched at the same Addis Ababa ceremony on 6 May 2026 as this briefing's publication date, making it one of the freshest structural investments in the continental biosecurity architecture. AMR is the slowest-moving pandemic story: resistant organisms accumulate in health systems largely invisibly until a cluster of treatment failures forces a response. The 1.3% AMR-testing rate means the continent cannot currently track resistance emergence in real time. ARILAC's One Health framing recognises that agricultural antibiotic use in livestock is as significant a driver of resistance as human clinical use, particularly in countries where integrated lab capacity for both has never existed.