Informatics tools supporting biomedical research and healthcare outcomes in Africa: current utilization and strategies to improve access

Purpose: Informatics tools are very crucial to improving biomedical research outcomes and providing quality healthcare in Africa. There are however challenges being encountered by scientists from African countries with respect to gaining access to the required tools for research and provision of healthcare. With respect to the purpose: In this research, we conducted a comprehensive study on the current utilization of informatics tools in biomedical and healthcare research and provided effective strategies to guarantee improved accessibility to these tools towards providing better research outcomes and improving healthcare in Africa. Materials and Methods: 60 survey participants with Postgraduate degrees of education distributed across Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western African countries participated in our study. Our methods centred on collecting data quantitatively by conducting an online survey, analyzing the data statistically and making informed decisions based on the results of our analysis. Results: Our results showed that; Limited usability skills and lack of internet access were the major limitations to current utilization of bioinformatics and computational biology tools by African researchers. NCBI and EMBL were the bioinformatics and computational biology resources mostly accessed by African researchers. Over 90% of the need of African researchers was on Genomic data, while 30% centred on proteomics. Other aspects of bioinformatics research such as metabolomics, transcriptomics have not been well explored by African researchers. The most widely accessed protein database by African scientists is the Uniprot. The most widely accessed nucleotide sequence databases are the GenBank (NCBI) and the EMBL-EBI. African scientists have high access to sequence alignment tools such as Blast, Clustal W and Phylogenetic informatics tools. Conclusion: In conclusion, recommendations were made based on the results obtained. In order to improve access to informatics tools among African researchers, provision of comprehensive bioinformatics education had the highest and best rating. Inter-institutional exchange of bioinformaticians and provision of bioinformatics educational resources had good ratings. Sponsoring scholars to bioinformatics conferences had the worst rating.