Africa does not just need more health funding. It needs smarter funding.
Where Africa’s Health Funders Align
Since its first meeting in 2021, the African Health Research and Innovation Funders Forum (AHRIFF) has grown into an international platform connecting organisations that finance, support, and invest in health research and innovation across Africa. As AHRIFF prepares for its sixth Forum in October 2026, the focus is increasingly on turning those connections into action.
Across Africa, significant investment flows into health research and innovation. Yet gaps remain between research, development, financing, and implementation, while organisations working towards similar goals may do so without a clear view of what others are funding.
AHRIFF was established to bring these different parts of the funding landscape together. Hosted annually since 2021 by the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC), the Forum connects African and international philanthropic and government funders, development finance institutions, investors, research organisations, and others supporting health innovation.
The goal is not simply to bring funders into the same room, but to give them a better understanding of the wider landscape: where investment is already concentrated, where critical gaps remain, and where working together could increase its impact.
Building a Community
The first AHRIFF meeting in 2021 focused on mapping the African health funding landscape and identifying opportunities for greater coordination. Over successive Forums, the conversation has moved towards specific areas where funders face shared challenges.
Health product manufacturing was one of the earliest. Drug and vaccine manufacturing became a major focus in 2022, followed by a satellite meeting in February 2023. A community of practice developed around the issue, with funders and ecosystem partners continuing to engage through subsequent meetings involving Unitaid and other organisations.
In 2024, the focus on strengthening African manufacturing was reflected in the inaugural industry-led AMMTEC conference, supported by organisations including H4D, Vizuri, FAPMA, the Global Fund, USP, Unitaid, and UNAIDS.
By 2025, AHRIFF had grown to its largest gathering yet. The fifth Forum, held in Cape Town from 5–7 November, brought together more than 100 registered participants representing more than 67 global funding agencies. Delegates came from more than 20 countries across six continents.
Its theme, “How can we ensure a multiplier impact of funding?”, reflected both this growth and a changing global health funding environment.
Discussions examined areas attracting considerable investment, including drug and vaccine manufacturing, pandemic preparedness and early warning systems, climate and health, big data, and artificial intelligence. The challenge was to make the most of that investment without creating parallel programmes and disconnected pockets of expertise.
Other conversations focused on where funding was falling short. One of the most prominent challenges was the financing needed to take promising innovations beyond research and early development towards implementation, commercialisation, and scale – often described as the “valley of death”. Participants explored how grants, development finance, private investment, and blended finance could better support different stages of that journey.
Entrepreneurship revealed a different kind of gap. A rapid survey during the 2025 Forum identified more than 15 entrepreneurship training programmes supported by different funders, yet none of the cohorts identified interacted with programmes supported by other funders. The discussion highlighted the potential for spaces where entrepreneurs from different programmes could meet, exchange knowledge, and build wider networks.
From Discussion to Action
As AHRIFF has developed, attention has increasingly shifted towards what happens after each Forum.
The manufacturing community provides one example of relationships continuing beyond the annual meeting. In 2025, other networks also explored ways to work together. Grand Challenges partners and Calestous Juma Science Leadership Fellows identified opportunities including shared advisory roles, cross-country learning, co-designed funding calls, and greater involvement of African scientific leaders in implementation programmes.
The 2025 Forum concluded with further opportunities identified around joint investments, collaborative funding proposals, harmonised priority-setting, and blended finance approaches.
This progression is shaping the sixth AHRIFF Forum, which takes place from 19–21 October 2026 at the President Hotel in Cape Town, preceded by an Innovative Financing for Health Research and Innovation satellite meeting on 18 October.
This year’s theme, “The need for alignment!”, brings the Forum back to the issue at the heart of AHRIFF since its inception, but with a stronger emphasis on problem-solving. The programme will examine African and global funding priorities, sustainable clinical research, science communication, innovative financing, AI, precision medicine and genomics, and ways of breaking down silos between funders.
The aim is also to look beyond individual meetings: to understand what has changed, identify where challenges persist, and build on conversations that are ready to move towards implementation.
Five editions have taken AHRIFF from mapping the funding landscape to building an international community around shared challenges. As the Forum enters its sixth year, the next step is to translate that community into stronger partnerships, better-connected investment, and greater opportunities for African health research and innovation to reach real-world impact.
