In the medium-term, the AU-3S programme plans to expand its COVID-19 response. Additional countries will help to increase AU-3S’s regional and language representation, and test new data sources’ integration with the DISD system. After this expansion is successfully up and running, the programme first plans to continue expansion to additional geographies while extending solutions to cover new and innovative medical products. Products will be selected from within African Union priority disease areas: Malaria, Tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and other emergency diseases such as COVID-19 and Ebola. These areas are subject to change based on public health need.

In the longer-term, AU-3S will transition towards achieving the long-term objective of strengthening safety surveillance of all priority medical products across Africa. A cornerstone of the long-term vision will be the creation of AfriVigilance, a continental database drawing from numerous different data sources across the end-to-end lifecycle of medical products. Ideally, this will include both pre-market and post-market authorisation data. AfriVigilance is envisioned to be African-owned and will aim to integrate safety data from across the African continent, empowering countries with an improved ability to act on the data. This holistic database of safety information should cover all priority medical products in Africa and should be used to inform safety decisions taken by pharmacovigilance experts from member states and at a regional level. Through AfriVigilance, the AU-3S programme aims to increase confidence in accelerated product development and/or in an emergency response.