[1] The H3Africa Consortium was formally launched in 2012 in Addis Ababa and has grown to include research projects across 32 countries, a pan-contintental bioinformatics network, and the first whole genome sequencing of many African ethnolinguistic groups.

[1] The policy framework for the initiative was centred around fairness in genomics and avoiding exploitation while building the continent's research capacity.

Among its goals, it would sample at least 100 ethnic groups from the continent, develop large-scale resource to study gene-environment interplay of diseases in Africa, train African scientists, and establish laboratories and local research capacity.

[5] At the 2009 AfSHG meeting in Yaoundé, Cameroon, the concept was renamed Human Heredity and Health in Africa" to reflect its goals and scope.

Several genetic loci related to stroke have been discovered, and the H3Africa array was developed to better suit single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that were common in African populations and act as a base for genome-wide association studies.