COVID-19 crisis era; Engineering interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Despite numerous notable contributions by Africans during the Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19) outbreak, little effort has been made to document these contributions in a comprehensive publication. Herein this work, an attempt was made to bring together African-based technological interventions proffered in Sub-Saharan Africa during this period. Across Africa generally, different engineering methods were used to develop several contrivances such as ventilators as well as deploying Artificial Intelligence to facilitate contact-free human- human and human-object interactions. Broadly, these approaches center on two key areas which are efforts to mitigate the spread of the infectious disease, and management of the infected, which are the focus of this present work. Indeed, a comprehensive report of these efforts is essential to appraise the contributions of the home-based researchers and to create an archive for future research and decision making across the African continent, thus necessitating the need for this systematic appraisal.