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A Model for Africa: Côte d’Ivoire Health Ministry Announces New Initiative to Become Self-Sufficient in Paediatric Cardiology Surgery

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3 years ago

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Health Ministry

The goal of the new initiative is to build a national effort to diagnose and treat many more children

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast, July 7, 2023/APO Group/ — 

Launched by Mitrelli Group, Menomadin Foundation, Save a Child’s Heart, Côte d’Ivoire Health Ministry and Abidjan Institute of Cardiology; Côte d’Ivoire Minister of Health: “Health-independence is a national strategic priority, and this project is a major step on the road to that vital goal.” ; Taking part in the project: Mitrelli’ s health subsidiary Promed International (Switzerland) and the Sylvan Adams Children’s Hospital (Israel), AFCAO and CHU Nantes (France).

The Mitrelli Group (https://Mitrelli.com/), the Menomadin Foundation (https://MenomadinFoundation.com/), Save a Child’s Heart (https://SaveaChildsHeart.org/), and the Côte d’Ivoire Health Ministry, this week announced an innovative local-capacity-building initiative in Côte d’Ivoire to establish the country’s local capabilities in the field of life-saving paediatric cardiac surgery, and enable the country to become a model for self-sufficiency in this field in the continent.

The initiative is rooted in the “UN’s Sustainable Development Goal to promote Good Health and Well Being”.

Approximately 1 in every 100 babies born in the world suffers from congenital heart disease (CHD), which are structural heart anomalies that occur during pregnancy when the heart or major blood vessels fail to develop properly. CHD is the most common type of birth defect, but with advanced medical care and treatment, the chances of infants and children fully recovering from CHD and living normal adult lives are better than ever. However, in countries where the necessary treatments are unavailable, CHD is the leading cause of mortality in the first year of life.

According to the WHO (https://apo-opa.info/3O1Ps2F), 2,700 out of 300,000 births registered each year in Côte d’Ivoire, suffer from congenital heart disease. However, the screening rate for these congenital heart diseases is very low (11%).

The goal of the new initiative is to build a national effort to diagnose and treat many more children, while jointly establishing Côte d’Ivoire’s paediatric cardiac surgery health-independence with advanced medical knowledge and resources.

As part of this new partnership, projected to last for 5 years, the Institut de Cardiologie d’Abidjan’s medical staff will undergo advanced training in various heart-related procedures from French and Israeli cardiology teams, enhancing their existing professional capabilities. Delegations of surgeons will travel throughout the year to Côte d’Ivoire, to perform operations on young patients, and provide training for local medical teams. In addition, medical teams from Côte d’Ivoire will benefit from state-of-the-art training in Israel in different fields of paediatric cardiac care.

The project will serve Côte d’Ivoire as a model and a reference point for paediatric cardiac surgery in Africa

The project will serve Côte d’Ivoire as a model and a reference point for paediatric cardiac surgery in Africa – not only reducing mortality rates but also improving quality of life for children. Meanwhile, the most serious and urgent cases will be transferred for immediate care in Israel.

The announcement of the initiative was made at a special meeting at the Côte d’Ivoire Ministry of Health and included the participation of nine children with heart deficiencies, ranging between the ages of 1 to 13 years old, who are traveling to Israel in the coming days to undergo life-saving heart procedures at the Sylvan Adams Children’s Hospital through Save a Child’s Heart.

In 2020, during the early stages of the project, the foundation, “Children of Africa” under the patronage of First Lady Mrs. Dominique Ouattara, Mitrelli Group, Menomadin Foundation and the NGO “Save a Child’s Heart”, worked together to facilitate successful surgeries in Israel for five children suffering from cardiologic conditions.

Minister of Health of Cote d’Ivoire Mr. Pierre Dimba spoke on the importance of health independence as a strategy of the government. “Patients with heart defects require not only surgery but also post-treatment. Sending children abroad for surgery is a blessing but not a long-term solution. Achieving health-independence in the field of paediatric cardiological care especially, is a national strategic priority, and this project is the first step on the road to that vital goal. Our vision is to stop outsourcing our healthcare, and instead begin to export our own capabilities to help others.”

He added, “We are extremely pleased with the cooperation with our partners and the treatments of our children at the Sylvan Adams Children’s Hospital through Save a Child’s Heart and we are looking forward to establishing this extremely important and strategic health model for our country and happy to see it serve as a model cross-Africa.”

Haim Taib, Founder and President of Mitrelli Group and Menomadin Foundation and President of Save a Child’s Heart Africa said: “This is an incredible opportunity to make a difference in the wellbeing of children and their future through upgrading local capacities and creating sustainable solutions. If 1% of children in the country need heart surgery, philanthropic activity, however blessed, is just a drop in the ocean. In order to create a significant, sustainable and long-term impact, the government must be involved, because only the government has the power to create a long-term solution. This is the Mitrelli model – to build long term sustainable development solutions in cooperation with our local partners in health, agriculture, education, and more, ​to create real impact. Together with Menomadin’s ability to provide solutions based on national roadmaps and impact management, I am sure that Cote d’Ivoire will be a model for additional countries.  We are extremely encouraged by Cote d’Ivoire leadership – the president and health minister – and their commitment to building a self-sufficient model to treat children, and proud to be working with such special partners.”

Eva Peled, Mitrelli’s Partner in Côte d’Ivoire stated: “We have been working with the government of Côte d’Ivoire and its ministry of health for several years. We discovered a wonderful country with many hidden gems, among which is the Abidjan Institute of Cardiology (ICA). The ambitious vision of His Excellency Alassane Ouattara, President of Côte d’Ivoire, has made the health sector a priority for the nation’s citizens. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Patrick Achi and the guidance of the Minister of Health Pierre Dimba, we are honored and proud to join forces in this humane initiative, which reflects our shared beliefs and values. We believe that Côte d’Ivoire will not only become a point of reference for cardiac surgeries, but for many other sectors in Africa.”

Professor Mohamed Ly, cardiac surgeon, and President of the AFCOA, added: “This extraordinary partnership signifies a monumental step towards providing essential surgical care and empowering local teams, ensuring a brighter future for children who currently lack access to these critical services.”

Simon Fisher, Executive Director of Save a Child’s Heart: “We are very grateful to the Mitrelli Group and the Menomadin Foundation for their partnership and for initiating the expansion to Cote d’Ivoire of Save a Child’s Heart activities.

The arrival of the group of nine children in Israel for lifesaving treatment at the Sylvan Adams Children’s Hospital is a major step in the implementation of this strategic initiative in partnership with the Côte d’Ivoire Health Ministry and the Institut de Cardiologie d’Abidjan. This group of children, and future groups to be treated in Israel, will complement the capacity building efforts in Côte d’Ivoire  led by the Association Française du Coeur pour l’Afrique de l’Ouest (AFCAO) and the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire (CHU) de Nantes from France turning this initiative into an truly international project that will lead to Côte d’Ivoire to  becoming self-sustainable in Paediatric Cardiac Care and a Regional leader in the field.”

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of Mitrelli Group.

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Cassava Technologies strengthens Africa’s cloud resilience with Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute Metro designation in Johannesburg

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13 hours ago

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July 20, 2026

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Cassava Technologies

As the first ExpressRoute Metro location in Africa, Johannesburg joins a select group of global technology hubs offering organisations access to a new level of cloud resilience and security

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, July 20, 2026/APO Group/ –Cassava Technologies (www.CassavaTechnologies.com), a global technology company, through its businesses – Africa Data Centres and Liquid C2, has expanded Africa’s cloud resilience capabilities after Africa Data Centres was designated a Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute Metro peering location in Johannesburg. This marks a significant milestone for Africa’s digital infrastructure and cloud ecosystem, reinforcing Cassava’s role as a key enabler of secure, resilient, and high-performance digital services across the continent.

 

By leveraging its status as the only provider with an on-net presence in both locations, Liquid C2, Cassava’s cloud and cyber security business, will deliver Secure CloudConnect. This fully managed service combines resilient private cloud connectivity with integrated cyber security solutions, providing organisations with a secure path to Microsoft Azure.

“Being designated a Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute Metro peering location is a defining moment for Africa Data Centres as well as for Africa’s digital infrastructure. It reflects growing confidence in the continent’s ability to support the next generation of cloud and AI-driven services while demonstrating the strength of our One Cassava model. By combining the infrastructure capabilities of Africa Data Centres with the cloud and cyber security expertise of Liquid C2, we are providing organisations with the resilient, secure, and trusted digital foundation they need to accelerate innovation and growth,” said Ziaad Suleman, Senior Vice President of Cassava Technologies South Africa and Botswana.

Being designated a Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute Metro peering location is a defining moment for Africa Data Centres as well as for Africa’s digital infrastructure

As the first ExpressRoute Metro location in Africa, Johannesburg joins a select group of global technology hubs offering organisations access to a new level of cloud resilience and security. Africa Data Centres’ JHB1 facility becomes the second peering location within the Johannesburg metro offering a local ExpressRoute Metro capability. ExpressRoute Metro routes a single connection through two peering locations in the same metro, adding built-in redundancy for mission-critical workloads.

This comes as regulators are placing greater emphasis on operational resilience, business continuity, risk management, and data protection.

Liquid C2’s Secure CloudConnect addresses these requirements by helping organisations reduce the risk of disruption, strengthen their security posture, and simplify the management of complex cloud environments, while meeting regulatory and governance expectations. Customers benefit from a single trusted provider while gaining access to infrastructure designed to support business-critical operations.

“South Africa isn’t waiting for the AI era – it’s helping to shape it, and that ambition rests on digital infrastructure the country can trust. With Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute Metro now available in Johannesburg, organisations across South Africa gain a more resilient and secure path to the cloud for their most critical workloads,” said Vukani Mngxati, CEO of Microsoft South Africa. “When businesses can build on trusted, resilient foundations, they can move faster, compete on the global stage, and turn South Africa’s digital ambition into real economic impact. We are proud to work with Cassava Technologies to help make that happen.”

This milestone marks a significant step forward for African enterprise digital transformation. By bridging hyper-scale infrastructure with managed cloud security, Cassava Technologies is actively future-proofing businesses across the continent, ensuring they have the speed, agility, and protection required to compete in the global digital economy.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of Cassava Technologies.

 

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Master Power Technologies Unveils R50m State-of-the-Art Customer Experience Centre at New Midrand Premises

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13 hours ago

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July 20, 2026

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Master Power Technologies

This milestone marks a significant step in the company’s continued expansion and commitment to advancing Africa’s data centre infrastructure

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, July 20, 2026/APO Group/ –Master Power Technologies (MPT) (https://kva.co.za/), a leading pan-African provider of turnkey data centre and critical power solutions, has unveiled its hi-tech Customer Experience Centre, also home to its new regional headquarters in Midrand.

Master Power Technologies Unveils R50m State-of-the-Art Customer Experience Centre at New Midrand Premises

This milestone marks a significant step in the company’s continued expansion and commitment to advancing Africa’s data centre infrastructure.

Founded in 1999 by electrical engineer Menno Parsons, MPT has grown from its origins as a Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) provider into a diversified engineering firm that delivers end-to-end solutions for data centres across Africa and the Middle East. Today, MPT designs, manufactures, and assembles a wide range of products under its flagship brands, SURE and AIVA, tailored to withstand Africa’s demanding operational environments.

The new Midrand facility spans 6 000m2 and will serve as MPT’s African headquarters, housing approximately 200 employees. Strategically located between Johannesburg and Pretoria, the site is positioned close to major data centre hubs, ensuring accessibility for clients and partners.

Hands-on environment

At the heart of the launch is the Customer Experience Centre, a R50 million investment designed to showcase MPT’s engineering capabilities and provide a hands-on environment for customers, partners, and trainees. The centre features advanced test facilities, including a 2 MVA UPS test platform and a 400kW cooling systems test centre, which is the most comprehensive of its kind on the continent.

These facilities enable performance testing to European certification standards, offering clients confidence in the reliability and efficiency of MPT’s solutions, with the company having become the first African business to be officially certified as an Endorser of the European Code of Conduct for Energy Efficiency in Data Centres in 2025.

The Experience Centre represents a new chapter for Master Power Technologies

“The Experience Centre represents a new chapter for Master Power Technologies. It’s about creating a space where customers can engage with our technology, see it in action, and understand the depth of our capabilities,” says MD and Founder of MPT Menno Parsons.

“This centre will be the most impressive UPS and cooling training facility in Africa, allowing our clients to touch, feel, and work with real systems in a way that has never been possible before.”

Commitment to local

The Experience Centre also highlights MPT’s commitment to local engineering and manufacturing. MPT assembles and engineers complete modular data centre and energy centre solutions within Africa. This approach reduces logistical risks, supports local industry, and ensures solutions are tailored to regional requirements.

Beyond technical demonstrations, the centre will serve as a hub for training and collaboration, equipping engineers and clients with practical knowledge to optimise data centre performance.

It also integrates MPT’s proprietary Advanced Infrastructure Visual Analytics (AIVA) monitoring platform, which manages and records metrics across more than 200 data centres in Africa, offering advanced analytics and operational insights.

“Our business has always been about more than just selling equipment. We engineer solutions for Africa, by Africa. This Experience Centre is a testament to that philosophy, which strengthens our ability to train, innovate and deliver world-class infrastructure while remaining rooted in local expertise,” says Parsons.

The launch of the Midrand offices and Experience Centre underscores MPT’s role as a trusted partner in Africa’s rapidly growing data centre sector. With demand for resilient, efficient, and scalable infrastructure on the rise, MPT’s investment positions the company to meet the evolving needs of clients across the continent and beyond.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of Master Power Technologies.

 

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Embracing an Intelligent Future: UnionPay Showcases AI Innovation at WAIC 2026

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14 hours ago

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July 20, 2026

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WAIC

Release of Phased Achievements of the National Pilot Base for AI Application (Financial Sector) Held Alongside the Conference

SHANGHAI, CHINA – Media OutReach Newswire – 20 July 2026 – On 17 July, the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) officially opened in Shanghai. UnionPay unveiled three proprietary AI technologies developed for the financial sector at the Shanghai exhibition area: financial transaction time-series foundation model, the Agentic Payment Open Protocol (APOP) framework, and a privacy-preserving large language model inference solution. As the AI era unfolds, the showcase highlights UnionPay’s continued commitment to accelerating the adoption of digital and intelligent technologies.

On 18 July, UnionPay hosted the Release of Phased Achievements of the National Pilot Base for AI Application (Financial Sector) at the UnionPay Center alongside WAIC 2026. The event brought together more than 100 representatives from commercial banks, Chinese and international partners, leading technology companies, academia, and research institutions. During the event, UnionPay released its “1+6+N” AI achievements framework, announced a series of industry partnerships, and launched a joint initiative calling for greater collaboration on the development and governance of the financial industry. These achievements demonstrate the progress of the National AI Application Pilot Base in building an open innovation platform that accelerates AI adoption across the industry.

Dong Junfeng, Chairman of China UnionPay and UnionPay International, attended the event and delivered a keynote speech. He noted that AI is rapidly reshaping the financial industry. Since the National AI Application Pilot Base was launched in 2025, it has delivered a number of meaningful outcomes through close collaboration across the industry. Mr. Dong elaborated on the vision for the development of the base from through three dimensions: sharing, collaborative governance, and mutual benefits. First, by pooling computing resources, data and models on a centralized public platform, the base helps address industry challenges such as the high cost of computing resources and data silos. This lowers barriers to AI adoption across the financial sector. Second, the base has strengthened AI security by building robust safeguards for large language models and applying AI to enhance transaction risk management and cybersecurity. Such efforts are made to support a safer and more resilient financial ecosystem. Third, the base is accelerating the AI adoption across real-world use cases. It has incubated a range of commercial AI solutions spanning agentic payments, credit risk management, consumption promotion and merchant digital transformation, turning technological innovation into tangible business value. Looking ahead, the future of AI + Finance holds enormous potential. UnionPay looks forward to working with partners across industries to build an open, shared, and well-governed financial AI ecosystem that supports the development of new productive forces through technological innovation.

A highlight of the event was the official launch of UnionPay’s “1+6+N” AI achievements framework.

The “1” represents a unified portal—the National AI Application Pilot Base. Built on a “One Portal, Six Centers” structure, it integrates six specialized centers covering models, datasets, applications, talent development, supply-demand matching, and financial services. Together, the platform currently hosts 11 models, 14 datasets, 59 demonstration applications, and 61 service offerings, bringing together 145 core resources in total.

The “6” refers to six independent and controllable capabilities, including computing resources scheduling through a trusted intelligent computing sharing platform, high-quality financial datasets, finance-specific foundation models, AI-powered financial security services, financial AI standards, and a pilot testing sandbox that supports model training and evaluation. Together, these six capabilities form the base’s shared technology foundation, providing ecosystem partners with the core technical infrastructure.

The “N” represents a portfolio of benchmark use cases, standardized AI solutions, and demonstration applications built on this technology foundation. These applications span five key areas—intelligent payments, inclusive finance, consumption growth, risk management and compliance, and operational excellence—building a multi-tier product portfolio serving consumers, merchants, local governments and financial institutions. This accelerates the application of AI capabilities across diverse use cases.

Together, the “1+6+N” framework of the base connects computing power, data, models, and use cases and forms an end-to-end value chain. By addressing common industry challenges—including limited computing resources, data silos and the high cost of AI deployment—it delivers standardized and widely accessible AI capabilities, providing the financial industry with reusable, highly secure and one-stop AI solutions for intelligent transformation. This also reflects UnionPay’s commitment not only to driving its own business growth, but also to enabling the industry through foundational capabilities and reinforcing financial infrastructure for the AI era.

These achievements have already been made available to industry partners and are beginning to create value. For banks, acquirers and other financial institutions, UnionPay’s shared infrastructure enables rapid access to mature financial AI capabilities without the need to build systems from scratch, significantly reducing both technical barriers and implementation costs. For merchants, UnionPay offers AI-powered marketing, digital analytics and intelligent risk management tools to support smarter operations, improve customer engagement and enhance operational efficiency, enabling even small and medium-sized businesses to benefit from AI innovation. For technology companies and other ecosystem partners, the base enables partners to rapidly adapt AI products for financial applications and complete compliance validation, accelerating the commercialization of technological innovations.

The event also featured six rounds of partnership signing ceremonies, covering areas including AI-themed card, cross-border agentic payment ecosystem development, AI-powered operational empowerment for merchants, joint commercialization of pilot base innovations, and broader ecosystem collaboration across the financial industry chain.

Following the signing ceremonies, UnionPay released the Initiative on the Collaborative Development and Governance of AI Applications in Financial Services, with representatives from participating organizations joining the stage to witness its launch. Building on the “1+6+N” framework, the initiative calls on industry stakeholders to collaborate in four areas: First, advancing trusted AI systems that serve the real economy by establishing governance mechanisms for traceable and explainable algorithms while safeguarding data privacy and security; Second, strengthening collaboration among industry, academia, research institutions and users, leveraging the base to jointly advance core technologies and develop independent and secure financial AI infrastructure; Third, promoting openness and inclusiveness by sharing mature AI models, testing services and implementation solutions to reduce the cost of intelligent transformation, particularly for SMEs; Fourth, improving lifecycle governance through tiered risk management, enhanced compliance standards and coordinated risk prevention. The initiative calls on all industry stakeholders to work together by jointly strengthening the foundation, unlocking greater value through shared capabilities, and reinforcing collaborative governance, with the goal of advancing the sound development of AI in the financial sector and driving digital finance through technological innovation.

 

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