The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the London-based charity Wellcome Trust launched a new initiative designed to bolster Africa's genomics research capacity. The Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) scheme announced on October 8 is a $38-million, five-year project aimed at studying diseases that affect the continent's people. “There is almost no cutting edge genomics in Africa. We can help correct that,” says Jane Peterson, a senior NIH advisor based in Bethesda, Maryland. The first H3Africa projects aim to identify genetic risk factors in African populations for a number of diseases, including rheumatic heart disease, kidney disease, diabetes, African sleeping sickness and cardio-metabolic diseases. The project will fund two repositories for genetic samples—one in South Africa, the other in Nigeria. A pan-African bioinformatics network providing computational hardware and training for staff in genomics and population-based research are also included. The findings could have global importance, says Pat Goodwin, head of pathogens, immunology and population health at the Wellcome Trust. Africans are more genetically diverse than any other group on the planet, she says. This genetic variability could make it easier for scientists to identify genetic risk factors that would be hard to spot in a more genetically homogenous population.