Africa CDC and European Commission Launch New Initiative to Strengthen Mpox Testing and Sequencing Across Africa

Africa CDC and European Commission Launch New Initiative to Strengthen Mpox Testing and Sequencing Across Africa


Addis Ababa/Brussels — The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) and the European Commission today announced the launch of the Partnership to Accelerate Mpox Testing and Sequencing in Africa (PAMTA), a landmark initiative to boost diagnostics and outbreak response capabilities in Mpox-affected African countries.

Co-funded under the EU4Health 2024 Work Programme, PAMTA reflects the growing momentum of Africa-EU health cooperation and aims to reinforce the continent’s resilience against current and future health threats. The initiative will accelerate testing, sequencing, capacity building, and local manufacturing efforts for mpox and other priority pathogens across Africa through a €9.4 million to Africa CDC and the African Society for Laboratory Medicine (ASLM), managed by the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA). The project officially began on 1 June 2025 and will be implemented over three years.

Africa CDC Director General, H.E. Dr Jean Kaseya, welcomed the initiative as a timely and strategic intervention to close the diagnostic gap for Mpox and other outbreaks in Africa. “This partnership reflects our commitment to working with trusted partners to build agile and self-reliant public health systems across Africa. Together with the EU and our technical partners, we are setting a new benchmark for outbreak detection and response.”

The PAMTA initiative focuses on four key objectives: scaling up Mpox testing with the goal of supporting over 150,000 tests across the continent; strengthening genomic sequencing capacity to track viral evolution and spread; building human resource capacity in molecular diagnostics, genomics, bioinformatics and data interpretation; and promoting the production and validation of locally developed testing kits within Africa.