The APCC trusted research environment (TRE) will use best practice from existing safe data environments (Trusted Research Environments (TRE) Green Paper https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4594704) using the principles of the Five Safes (https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2017/01/27/the-five-safes-data-privacy-at-ons/) to protect data integrity. The proposed TRE will support the following capabilities: 1. **Data Security and Privacy:** It will implement strong data protection measures to ensure that sensitive information is kept secure and private. This includes encryption, secure access controls, and auditing capabilities to track who accesses the data and what they do with it. 2. **Controlled Access:** Access to the data within a TRE is strictly controlled and monitored. Researchers will go through an approval process before they can access the data, and their activities within the environment will be logged and reviewed. 3. **Data Anonymisation and Pseudonymisation:** To further protect privacy, data within a TRE will be anonymised or pseudonymised, removing or replacing personal identifiers with artificial identifiers or none at all, making it difficult to trace data back to individuals. Specific consideration will be given to the complexities associated with pseudonymization of longitudinal data. 4. **Secure Analysis Tools:** The TRE will provide researchers with tools and software for analysing the data within the secure environment. This ensures that sensitive data does not need to be moved outside of the secure environment, reducing the risk of data breaches. learning from initiatives as G4GH we will develop means for federated access to data held directly by cohorts themselves. 5. **Legal and Ethical Compliance:** The TRE will designed to comply with relevant laws and regulations, in African countries, ensuring that data is handled legally and ethically. Close collaboration with the DSI-A Africa Law project will facilitate this process. 6. **Collaboration Support:** The APCC TRE will support collaboration among researchers, allowing them to work together securely on shared datasets. #### OpenSAFELY Collaboration The [OpenSAFELY](https://www.opensafely.org/) Collaborative has developed a range of open source Trusted Research Environment tools that have successfully addressed major challenges around privacy, transparency, reproducibility of analyses, shared data management, federated analysis across multiple data centres, and an efficient user experience. These tools have been successfully deployed against the full NHS primary care electronic health records of the whole population of England (split across two data centres), with strong support from privacy advocates and professional bodies who have historically objected to all prior means for accessing this structured data. The tools are now being used on 155 projects from 22 different organisations. The team also has extensive experience of running TREs: they have run the NHS England OpenSAFELY TRE in GP data for four years, and the OpenSAFELY head of platform development previously developed and ran the UK Office of National Statistics Secure Research Service.   OpenSAFELY offers an opportunity for APCC's aim to create a community of practice around secure and trusted access to cohort data. Specifically with the OpenSAFELY team, we have the following aims/objectives: 1. To develop a technical specification/design for the development and deployment of OpenSAFELY-based TREs in individual cohort data centres or shared data centres within countries as part of the wider APCC community with the APCC and individual cohorts’ delivery teams. The team will conduct a detailed scoping exercise to decide to develop a new TRE or leverage commercial TREs that build on proprietary and customizable platforms that are packaged as SaaS. The overall aim will be to transfer knowledge on TRE set up in Africa through the APCC. 2. To co-develop and implement a harmonised data model for population cohorts with advisory input from the OPENSafely and INSPIRE teams with the active involvement and support from cohort data managers. 3. Lead on designing and then collaboratively delivering - with capacity building and technology transfer as a high priority alongside delivery - a set of tools and a service for joined-up federated analytics of cohort data across multiple data centres. This will make best use of prior art including OpenSAFELY components and other prior open-source tools for federated analytics, including those developed and deployed in APCC sites already, and will be done in close collaboration with APCC and individual cohorts’ delivery teams. 4. Capacity building and technology transfer. The INDEPTH iSHARE experience and the common data model, ETL and Centre-in-a-Box are examples of prior continental initiatives towards data harmonisation and sharing in secure environments. This has also been used as a starting point for the INSPIRE. Exposure and training in other types of data models beyond OMOP that adequately map population cohort data and allow modification of vocabularies and ontologies for African data. Leveraging experience in modifying different ontologies and vocabularies, OpenSAFELY will leverage existing initiatives such as the OHDSI community.