The College works with partners in Africa across a broad range of contexts. The College’s top collaborating countries in terms of joint publications are South Africa, Kenya and Uganda.

The largest African student cohorts at the College are from Nigeria, Botswana, Kenya, Mauritius and South Africa and at any one time there are over 250 Africans studying on College programmes.

The College partners with a number of universities and institutes in programmes designed to strengthen indigenous capacity in research. In May 2016 the College launched The Centre of African Research and Engagement (ICCARE) to bring together much of the work taking place across the College. 

A few examples of current partnerships are listed below:

Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI) is a charitable institution based at the College that works in sub-Saharan Africa to eliminate the life-threatening effects of Schistosomiasis (bilharzia) and intestinal worms (hookworm, whipworm and roundworm).Since 2010 it has worked in countries such as Burundi, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

The Partnership for Child Development (PCD) works with governments, communities and development agencies to deliver effective and sustainable school health and nutrition (SHN) programmes in Africa.  PCD is currently running the Home Grown School Feeding (HGSF) programme in Ghana, Kenya, Mali and Nigeria, headed by Dr Lesley Drake.  In Nigeria, the Vice President launched the national school feeding programme citing the College as the key partner.

The College works closely with the MRC Gambia and has a number of staff based there. As a result of this, papers produced with researchers in Gambia have the highest number of citations per document for any collaborating country around the world.

In South Africa the College works closely with the University of Cape Town (UCT).  In 2015 and 2016 the College and UCT co-ran Global Health Summer Schools for Doctoral students.  There are also close links between the Department of Medicine and the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine at UCT.

Furthermore, Imperial academics are connecting with their African counterparts through a range of individual collaborations, primarily through the Faculty of Medicine in areas such as HIV, Malaria and neglected tropical diseases but also across other fields.