Africa CDC (Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the African Union's public health agency), ASLM (African Society for Laboratory Medicine) and the European Union launched ARILAC (Advancing Regional Integrated Laboratory Capacity for AMR Control) in Addis Ababa on 6 May 2026 . The four-year programme is funded through the Team Europe Initiative on Sustainable Health Security and will operate across eight AU states: Cameroon, Chad, Ethiopia, Gabon, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Uganda and Zimbabwe. It works on a One Health basis, integrating human and veterinary microbiology surveillance.
The baseline figure does the editorial work. Of more than 50,000 medical laboratories assessed across 14 African countries in Africa CDC's continental review, only 1.3% conduct routine AMR (antimicrobial resistance) testing, leaving roughly 261 million people without access to AMR diagnostics. Without diagnostic capacity, prescribers cannot distinguish between sensitive and resistant pathogens, antibiotic stewardship cannot be enforced, and surveillance cannot feed back into treatment guidelines. Resistance accumulates as a silent baseline that only surfaces when a clinician runs out of working antibiotics for a patient WHO would have been treatable a year earlier.
One Health framing matters structurally rather than rhetorically here. Resistance genes circulate through livestock, wastewater and clinical settings on a single ecology; an antibiotic deployed in poultry feed in one country can drive resistance in a human pathogen in another within years. ARILAC's design routes diagnostic capacity through veterinary as well as human laboratories, on the logic that the surveillance feed has to match the actual pathway resistance travels. The eight participating states span West, Central, East and Southern Africa, which gives the programme a continental footprint without requiring all 55 AU members to commit at the launch stage.
Team Europe Initiatives pool development-cooperation budgets across EU member states, the European Commission and European development finance institutions, which produces a larger and more stable funding pipeline than bilateral aid arrangements typically achieve. ARILAC's four-year horizon and continental scope both rest on that pooled EU commitment. Whether the programme moves the 1.3% baseline materially over four years depends on three things visible from launch: how fast laboratory accreditation can be brought to WHO GLASS (Global antimicrobial resistance and Use Surveillance System) reporting standards, whether ministries of health absorb operating costs after the EU funding window closes, and whether the One Health surveillance feed actually reaches treatment guidelines rather than sitting in dashboard form.
