We welcome the addition of Dr Elvis Temfack to the COVID-19 Clinical Research Coalition’s Steering Committee as a representative of the African Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC).

Seven members of the COVID-19 Clinical Research Coalition participated in a side event on lessons learnt on the strength of collaboration during the COVID-19 pandemic at the Second International Conference on Public Health in Africa (CPHIA 2023) in Kigali, Rwanda on 12 Dec 2022. The session saw researchers sharing challenges and solutions in a series of talks that ranged from how to re-think research partnerships between institutions in the global South and North to planning for pandemic preparedness that would see strengthened disease surveillance through biobanking and sequencing capacity across the continent.

In the two and a half years since the Coalition was established, research priorities are changing, and there is a growing focus on preparedness for future outbreaks. The Steering Committee and Secretariat of the Coalition met with the chairs and coordinators of several Coalition working groups and agreed that the Coalition must extend its scope beyond COVID-19 to respond to future epidemics and pandemics while not losing its focus on national and regional leadership in research and preparedness.

The Coalition’s Maternal, Newborn and Child Health Working Group is conducting a follow-up survey to assess changes in global Maternal, Newborn and Child Health priorities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The follow-up survey has additional questions about the impact of the pandemic on adolescent sexual and reproductive health and pregnancy.