CLSI: Building Laboratory Capacity in Africa

The Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) is a global, nonprofit, membership-driven organization dedicated to developing standards and guidelines for the health care and medical testing community. CLSI's mission is to develop best practices in clinical and laboratory testing and to promote their use throughout the world, using a consensus-driven process that balances the viewpoints of industry, government, and the health care professions. CLSI recognizes that health is the most important foreign policy issue of our time. In response to the call for laboratory capacity building, and on behalf of the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, CLSI has developed the Global Health Partnerships (GHP) program. Working collaboratively, the GHP program is improving the quality of care by providing laboratory capacity-building assistance to combat HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. An important first step in the fight against infectious disease is improving access to reliable, high-quality laboratory testing.