On 10-14 April 2022, the BERC-Luso coordination team visited Guinea Bissau. The BERC-Luso project’s main goal is to enhance biomedical ethics and regulatory capacities in Portuguese speaking African countries. The visit included meetings with Guinea Bissau’s national authorities and political representatives, a meeting with the Ambassador of Portugal, a Conference of the National Committee of Ethics in Health Research and BERC-Luso, and a visit to the Bandim Health Project – a health and demographic surveillance system site that is one of the longest-running health projects in the country.

At the institutional level, the coordination team identified actions to be implemented that will improve the effective functioning of the institutions. The next steps will be to seek approval from Guinea Bissau’s National People’s Assembly of the Statute of the National Committee of Ethics in Health Research (the law that creates a code of ethics in research) and the Investigator Code of Conduct.