6 October 2026
Echezona Ebenezer, Achraf El Allali, Ichrak Hayah, Abdoallah Sharaf, Sadik Muzemil, Sarah Chidi Ihenko, Chukwuike Ebuzome, Zahra Mungloo-Dilmohamud, Andrews Frimpong Adu, Stanford Kwenda, Semir Bechir Suheil Gaouar, Yedomon Ange Bovys Zoclanclounon, Yonas Gebremichael Difer, Zewdu Edea, Emmanuel Hala Kwon-Ndung, Samson Pandam Salifu, Bupe Ruhama Mwambingu, Craig John Kinnear, Anne WT Muigai, Julian Onyewuonyeoma Osuji, Bouabid Badaoui - Nature Reviews Genetics, 2026
Africa is home to around one-quarter of the world’s mammalian species, almost one-fifth of its bird species, at least one-sixth of its plant species and more than one-quarter of its freshwater fish species1,2,3. Moreover, Africa includes 8 of the world’s 36 biodiversity hotspots4, highlighting its role in global biodiversity conservation. This natural capital is dispersed across 55 sovereign states, each with its own emerging expectations around consent and benefit-sharing of genetic resources and digital sequence information (DSI). Despite the continent’s rich biodiversity, its share of global public genome data does not exceed 4.9%. By contrast, South America accounts for 14%, Europe for 22.2%, Asia for 23.6%, and North America for 31.1% of global public genome data5 (Supplementary Fig. 1). Although the historical lack of INSDC spatiotemporal metadata accounts for much of this gap, it highlights the need for early, upstream involvement and deeper engagement with potential sample and data providers to increase global genomics data representation and promote mutual benefits. This gap is not rooted in the absence of scientific research across Africa, but in the shortage of African-governed infrastructure for what African science produces6. In contrast to global genomic databases from high-income research systems7, Africa remains constrained by a lack of sequencing infrastructure, computational resources and trained workforce required to participate in DSI generation and governance at a scale commensurate with its biodiversity.
African institutions require infrastructure to deposit genomes, proteomes, structures, metagenomes or a set of environmental DNA results, secure in knowing that the data will remain visible, shareable, citable and under their own institution’s stewardship. The African DSI DataBank for Biodiversity and Agriculture, developed by the African BioGenome Project (AfricaBP), is launching as a federated platform built specifically to host, curate and govern access to Africa-origin biodiversity and agricultural DSI.