>90 Albuminuria Tanzania Peck et al48 GP Geographical cohort 1041 18–92 46.2 Enzymatic 25.1 to >90 NA Tanzania Stanifer et al50 GP Geographical cohort 468 18–88 25.6 Enzymatic 9.2 to >90 Albuminuria Uganda Kalyesubula et al44 GP Geographical cohort 955 18–87 33.0 Enzymatic 44.7 to >90 Proteinuria Uganda Odongo et al54 HIV HIV clinic cohort 361 18–66 36.3 Jaffe 4.6 to >90 Proteinuria *Unpublished data †Part of the multisite study, Africa Wits-INDEPTH partnership for Genomics studies.62 ‡Part of the multisite study, Research on Obesity and Diabetes among African Migrants.40 GFR is estimated by the the CKD Epidemiology Collaboration equations,64 with the ethnicity correction factor omitted. CKD, chronic kidney disease; DM, diabetes mellitus; eGFR, estimated glomerular filtration rate; FDR, first-degree relatives; GP, general population; HPT, hypertension; NA, not applicable; RoC, Republic of Congo; SA, South Table 1 Africa. Continued Figure 2 Average contribution of each subpopulation to the overall number of studies enrolled in the CKD-Africa Collaboration. CKD, chronic kidney disease. on July 8, 2022 by guest. Protected by copyright. http://gh.bmj.com/ BMJ Glob Health: first published as 10.1136/bmjgh-2021-006454 on 4 August 2021. Downloaded from George C, et al. BMJ Global Health 2021;6:e006454. doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2021-006454 7 BMJ Global Health CKD-Africa Collaboration manager at cindy.george@ mrc.ac.za. Funding There are more financial constraints in LMICs than in affluent high-income countries (HICs). Foreign funding for conducting research in Africa is sparse,60 so having partners from HICs could help acquire important resources for the consortium. Besides funding from the South African National Research Foundation, our research efforts have yet to receive major funding. However, there are concerted efforts being made to attract funding from various sources, with the purpose of the funding geared at (1) capacity development, by attracting and supporting junior African researchers to undertake their postgraduate and postdoctoral projects using the consortium as basis; (2) popularising the work of the consortium, through a website, and workshops and (3) database maintenance. NOVELTY AND EFFECTIVENESS OF THE CKD-AFRICA COLLABORATION There is a significant demand for research to direct and strengthen policies related to non-communicable diseases, in particular CKD research in Africa. This network is thus in the ideal position as we aim to provide evidence that could inform health services planning and shape policy and guidelines in Africa and drive the agenda for expanding CKD research. This would inevitably result in improved care for the vulnerable and most affected populations on the continent. The consortium is an ideal platform that will serve as background for future studies in which it is expected to play a major role. Indeed, this platform will allow for discussions centred on standardisation of approaches, related to study design, kidney function measurements and estimating prevalence, enhancing the interpretability of analyses, and integrating data from multiple cohort studies. Our work will create a forum for sharing analytical methods and enhance funding opportunities allowing for the development of ancillary studies using standardised methodology. Further, the potential to combine study data across the network will enhance the ability to examine multiple health outcomes related to CKD, in addition to the ability to report more accurate estimates on the burden of CKD across Africa. This will be used to inform prevention, detection and control strategies at a regional level. Through the evidence generated by the consortium we aim to actively engage policymakers to prioritise CKD reduction. Another major advantage of the large data capacity expected through this collaborative endeavour, is that this consortium could support the training of Masters students and Doctoral fellows across Africa. The consortium will also provide an opportunity for further research capacity training and networking for investigators across Africa. IPD meta-analysis, which is the primary methodology used by the CKD-Africa Collaboration, has major advantages above those of a conventional meta-analysis. Therefore, given the controversies surrounding the use of the various equations for estimating GFR to diagnose CKD, an IPD meta-analysis will provide standardised estimates across studies. Given the larger sample size through combined studies, IPD meta-analysis will also allow the performance of subgroup analyses (eg, by region, by country, epidemiological transition and over time), which would otherwise not have been possible by any primary study. Further, while there is little opportunity to check for biases from published aggregate data, IPD can be checked for missing, invalid, out-of-range and inconsistent datapoints in the datasets, before incorporating these into the larger merged dataset. Therefore, rather than implementing conventional meta-analyses, we seek opportunities to combine primary data from different groups to implement joint analyses, given the many commonalities between participating studies that will facilitate comparative research. By providing more detailed and reliable results, IPD meta-analyses offer greater potential than aggregate-data