The first version of the AFRICA BUILD Portal (ABP) has been developed. And now it's time to think in new functionalities for the future that could be integrated or implemented for the Portal: existing tools that could be useful, relevant databases, tools and new methods... definitely, new functionalities that can be useful for the African health researcher.

To do this, we generated some brainstormings in the African institutions of the project. Each one of the African partners explained the ABP in its own institution and other local institutions focused on health research/training and collect possible ideas. After that, we will share those ideas seeing if they are feasible, common between ideas from different groups, etc.

ITI-MCIT (Egypt) and FMPOS (Mali) have launched this initiative in their institutions. In Egypt, the brainstorming was done at ITI in two parts on May 11-12, 2013 with Health Informatics Fellowship Intake2 students. In Mali, they had some demonstration sessions with MPH students and researchers from Serefo HIV/TB research Labs, and also with some students and resident doctors. AFRICA BUILD project and the ABP were explained to the attendees and they found the ABP very useful for communicating, sharing, and learning.

AFRICA BUILD participated in IST-Africa 2013 conference and exhibition in Nairobi presenting two papers:
- "AFRICA BUILD Portal: Developing a Social Network of African Health Researchers and Educators"
- "Evidence Based Medicine in HIV/AIDS and Reproductive Health Research: Piloting Two Distance Learning Courses in Low-Resource Settings"

This event was part of the IST-Africa Initiative, which is supported by the European Commission and African Union Commission and co-funded under the EU Framework Programme.

The goals of the IST-Africa Conference Series are Community Building to facilitate EU-African research cooperation and successful exploitation of research results, to stimulate take-up of RTD results by industry and the public sector, to promote knowledge sharing between commercial, government and research organisations, to exchange experiences about the current state of eAdoption at a sectoral, national or regional level, and to support International Cooperation and open up the European Research Area (ERA) to Africa.

Ana Jimenez presented AFRICA BUILD project at the Safari Conference Centre in Windhoek (Namibia) during the 8th eLearning Africa Conference with over 1,200 participants and more than 300 speakers.

On 16 and 17 May 2013, a workshop on scientific writing was organized in the context of pilot course "Clinical Research on HIV / AIDS." This workshop facilitated by Dr. Yehia said Sadio Sarro, teacher and facilitator of the pilot course, aimed to with malian participants the content of a similar workshop in Yaounde.
Of the 22 students initially enrolled in the pilot course, 19 took part in this workshop. They were specialists in public health and medical doctors, residents in infectious diseases.
During the workshop, participants were introduced to several topics such as: the formulation of a research question, review of the methodology, presentation and discussion of results, the submission of a scientific paper. Also, a practical example of systematic review has been explained.
At the end of the workshop, Malian students have completed the final test and did general evaluation of the pilot course.

During this workshop, students have benefited from practical case of scientific writing, the formulation of a research question, review of the methodology, presentation and discussion of results, the submission of a scientific paper. Also, a practical example of systematic review has been done.
Finally, we took in a video format prints of some participants.

The Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp has presented a first overview of the training program in HIV/AIDS and Reproductive Health research, developed in collaboration with the World Health Organization Department of Reproductive Health and Research (RHR) and colleagues from the University of Bamako, from the University of Yaoundé I, and the University of Ghana for the Work Package 6 (WP6) of AFRICA BUILD.

Med-e-Tel is an official event of the International Society for Telemedicine & eHealth (ISfTeH), the international federation of national associations who represent their country's Telemedicine and eHealth stakeholders. The two pilot courses developed in WP6 focus on Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) in the field of HIV/AIDS and Reproductive Health in clinical care and research. These courses aim at young researchers or clinicians who do clinical research from their daily practice, to provide them with skills to find and assess up-to-date evidence in health care. Nowadays there is more evidence available as well as more opportunities for this evidence to be used in effective interventions to be linked to research questions. The practice of EBM signifies the integration of individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research. The benefits of evidence based practice are many-fold: knowledge of latest clinical evidence empowers healthcare workers to make informed decisions regarding optimal care, and empowers health facilities’ workers to demand and/or implement better healthcare interventions. In addition, the use of EBM enables those working with(in) health facilities and programmes in identifying gaps in research and in developing systematic strategies to address these gaps.

The aim of these distance learning pilot courses is to enhance research and education in the above-mentioned fields, via novel approaches and to identify research needs, emanating from the field. This pilot experience, which will be run both in English-speaking (Ghana and Cameroon), and French-speaking (Mali and Cameroon) partner institutions and produce courses for strengthening research methodology and policy. Study material is available for the courses’ participants through the AFRICA BUILD Portal and modules’ content is delivered via recorded DUDAL webcasts.

An important question at the end of the presentation was raised by Dr. Richard Scott, Associate Professor in the Global e-Health Research and Training Program of the Centre for Innovation in Health Technology from the University of Calgary (Canada) about Quality control in distance education, to whom the flow of the content generation and revision has been drafted and made available.