Welcome Address by Professor Godwin Ogbole

Director, SMART Africa Network

My dear friends,

It gives me great joy to welcome you to the 5th SMART Africa MRI Workshop in Cape Town, South Africa. Five years ago, SMART Africa began with a simple but stubborn idea: that MRI education, access, research, and innovation in Africa should not remain a luxury for a few centres, but a shared opportunity for radiologists, radiographers, physicists, biomedical engineers, scientists, and trainees across the continent.

Since then, we have moved—sometimes elegantly, sometimes with the grace of a slightly confused MRI trolley—through Mbarara, Uganda, Accra, Ghana, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Lagos, Nigeria, and now Cape Town. We have trained, retrained, argued over sequences, survived poor funding, stretched personal resources, leaned on friendships, and discovered again and again that African science grows best when people refuse to wait for perfect conditions. Our past workshops have brought together participants from many African countries, supported travel grants, and offered hands-on demonstrations, mentoring, networking, and opportunities for young professionals across radiology, radiography, medical physics, biomedical engineering, and allied MRI disciplines.

SMART Africa has always been more than a workshop. It is a movement to strengthen MRI access, research, and training in Africa—to build capacity, create mentorship pathways, support career development, and ensure that African MRI specialists are not only users of technology, but contributors to global innovation. We are proud that SMART Africa helped provide the energy, relationships, and foundation that gave rise to the ISMRM African Chapter. Today, we celebrate the growth of that Chapter and honour the leaders and partners who helped carry the vision forward: Johnes, Ernesta, Leon Janse van, Udunna, myself, and many others, together with our global partners, including Derek Jones, Iris Asllani, Andrew Webb, Farouk Dako, and Nivedita Agarwal. Their support has been more than technical; it has been deeply human, generous, and consistent.

This year’s Cape Town programme is especially exciting. We began with a virtual MRI webinar on 1 May, followed today by the in-person MRI Workshop and tomorrow by the Low-Field MRI Stakeholders Meeting at All Africa House. The schedule includes lectures, interactions, and networking sessions covering all aspects of MRI. There will be interactive panels, mentoring sessions, and brain teasers to sharpen our minds and keep us relaxed and bright.

One major highlight will be the educational MRI site visits: participants will have the opportunity to see the breadth of MRI in Cape Town, from low-field MRI to a 1.5T system at Groote Schuur Hospital, and a 3T Siemens MRI at the Cape Universities Brain Imaging Centre. This is not just sightseeing; it is a living classroom showing the scope of  MRI science in Africa. Bringing together technology, training, and collaboration.

We are also delighted to host important discussions on democratising low-field MRI in Africa, including A4IM, Hyperfine, open-source imaging, hardware, software, data, reconstruction, regulatory pathways, and practical barriers to implementation. Low-field MRI gives us a new kind of hope: not a replacement for high-field systems, but a bridge to communities that have waited too long for access to neuroimaging.

Africa is not a small story. It is a continent of more than 50 countries and over 1.5 billion people, with the world’s youngest population and a rapidly expanding workforce. By 2050, one in every three young people globally is projected to be African, and Africa’s working-age population is expected to rise dramatically.  If we train this generation well, Africa will not merely receive science; Africa will shape science.

So, to everyone joining us in Cape Town: thank you. Thank you for coming, for believing, for supporting, for teaching, for learning, and for refusing to let distance, funding gaps, visa stress, and occasional conference chaos stop us. Please engage fully, mentor generously, ask questions boldly, and enjoy the beauty of Cape Town and the warmth of South African hospitality, and perhaps you will find an African penguin on the way.

Welcome to SMART Africa 2026. Welcome to Cape Town. Welcome to the future of MRI in Africa.