– The visiting Chinese Foreign Minister, Qin Gang, and the Chairperson of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahmat, today opened the Africa Center for Disease Control (Africa CDC) Headquarters in Addis Abeba, Ethiopia.
At the 2018 Beijing Summit and the 7th Ministerial Conference of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) held in Beijing, the Chinese government vowed to assist the building of Africa CDC. African leaders reacted positively to the move.
The state-of-the-art Africa CDC HQ is located in the African Village, south of Addis Abeba, over an area of 90,000m2 with a total building area of almost 40,000m2.
It houses a data center, an emergency operations center, a laboratory, a resource center, briefing rooms, training and conference centers, offices, and expatriate residences, among other things. The Chinese government built, supplied, and outfitted the $80 million complex.
The headquarters building is expected to become one of Africa’s best-equipped disease control centers, allowing the Africa CDC to play its role as the technical institution coordinating disease prevention, surveillance, and control on the continent in collaboration with Member States’ national public health institutes and ministries of health.
The AU Commission and the Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China signed the Implementation Agreement on the Africa CDC HQ construction project in July 2020, in accordance with a number of agreements made between the AU and the Government of China.
Foreign Minister Qin Gang is on a five-country African tour that began in Ethiopia and will take him to Benin, Angola, Gabon, and Egypt, as well as the headquarters of the African Union and the League of Arab States, in order to “deepen the China-Africa comprehensive strategic and cooperative partnership and boost friendly cooperation.”
According to the Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Ethiopia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Demeke Mekonnen yesterday to strengthen their cooperation on political and economic problems.