The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), in collaboration with African Union Member States, regional institutions and technical partners, has advanced efforts to establish a harmonised continental framework for Behavioural Intelligence and Infodemic Management (BIIM) to strengthen public health decision-making across Africa.
The move followed a five-day technical workshop held in Mombasa, Kenya, from August 30 to September 3, 2026, where public health experts reviewed and validated key components of the emerging continental BIIM package.
The package includes a BIIM Framework, Strategy, Digital and Data Architecture, as well as a Roadmap for institutionalisation and implementation.
The process brought together representatives from Burundi, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritania, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe, alongside the ECOWAS Regional Centre for Surveillance and Disease Control (RCSDC), WHO’s Africa Infodemic Response Alliance (AIRA) and other technical partners.
BIIM is being developed as a public health intelligence capability that will enable countries to integrate behavioural and social data, community feedback, social listening, information-environment signals, programme and service-delivery data and rapid research to generate intelligence that can inform public health decisions.
The initiative is designed to address a major challenge facing African health systems: not necessarily the absence of data, but the fragmentation of information across programmes and institutions and the difficulty of connecting such evidence to decisions and action.
The framework is therefore not intended to create another database, platform or parallel reporting system.
Rather, it seeks to connect existing national capabilities while establishing common standards for data quality, governance, interoperability and shared learning.
Kenya’s Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Health, Mary Muthoni Muriuki, stressed the importance of national ownership in the process.
“BIIM is not another platform or parallel system. It strengthens and connects existing national capabilities,” she said.
Muriuki also agreed to champion BIIM across Africa, with the aim of strengthening Member State leadership and political engagement around its institutionalisation.
Under the proposed model, Member States will determine the institutional home, governance arrangements, data stewardship and implementation model for their national BIIM capabilities.
Africa CDC, on the other hand, will provide continental stewardship through common standards, technical guidance, coordination, quality assurance and cross-country learning.
This means continental harmonisation will not require every country to adopt identical institutional structures or technologies.
Instead, countries will have flexibility to integrate BIIM into their existing public health systems while working within agreed continental standards.
The Special Representative of the Director General for the Eastern Africa Regional Coordinating Centre, Africa CDC, Dr Lul Pout Riek, said institutionalisation would be the real test of the initiative.
“The technical architecture is important, but institutionalisation is the real test,” Riek said.
He said behavioural intelligence must become part of the routine processes through which public health institutions understand risks, make decisions and respond to emerging challenges.
A major focus of the Mombasa workshop was ensuring that BIIM does not stop at collecting behavioural and social information.
The proposed intelligence-to-action pathway begins with identifying a priority question, gathering signals, integrating and triangulating evidence, interpreting and diagnosing the issue, prioritising it and producing decision-ready intelligence.
