Other Wellcome Trust activities in South Africa

The Wellcome Trust is committed to spending some £80 million on health research in low- and middle-income countries between 2008 and 2012. In Africa, the Trust supports Major Overseas Programmes in Kenya, Malawi and South Africa.

The Trust funds several other activities in South Africa. Birth to Twenty is the largest and longest-running study of child and adolescent health and development in Africa, following over 2000 Soweto children and adolescents from birth to adulthood to determine how social and environmental factors affect health and development. The Agincourt Health and Population Unit, led by the University of Witwatersrand in partnership with the South African Medical Research Council, is a demographic surveillance system tracking chronic non-communicable diseases and declining fertility in a rural population resulting from the rapid health and socioeconomic changes in South Africa. In addition, researchers based at the University of KwaZulu-Natal are exploring the ethics of conducting HIV vaccine trials in South Africa.

Across the country, a Strategic Award from the Trust is establishing a Centre For Clinical Infectious Disease Research (CCIDR) at the University Of Cape Town to develop the research capacity of local scientists to study HIV, tuberculosis, malaria and respiratory infections. The Trust also supports several fellows at the University, looking at tuberculosis in an era of HIV co-infection and the rise of drug-resistant strains.

See the map of South Africa.