Forensic DNA infrastructure in Africa is not a funding problem alone. It is a policy problem, an education problem, a public awareness problem, and a quality management problem — and all of them have to move at the same time for any of them to stick. That is the argument Vanessa Lynch has been making, and living, since 2004.
Lynch is the founder of DNA for Africa, a continental platform for collaboration among forensic scientists, lawmakers, and policymakers across Africa. Before that, she ran the DNA Project, the NGO she established after her father was murdered and no forensic evidence was collected at the scene. Over the years that followed, she helped create South Africa’s first forensic honours degree, drove legislation through three government administrations, and worked to establish a national DNA database. She is currently completing a PhD and consulting with countries across the continent on DNA legislation and laboratory capacity.
Lynch presented at ISHI 36. Michael Menear, a Promega UK Student Ambassador and PhD candidate researching body fluid identification, sat down with her to learn more about the work.
Your path into this field started with your father’s murder in 2004. How did that experience shape the way you approached building forensic infrastructure?
Lynch describes it as a wake-up call about what was missing at every level — not just inside the laboratory. In her father’s case, evidence was not collected because the public did not know it needed to be preserved. His clothes were discarded by doctors. The crime scene was cleaned before investigators arrived. “These were the kind of things that were happening and why there was just no evidence to be taken in my dad’s case,” she says. The perpetrators were never found.
That experience led her to approach the problem holistically. Rather than focusing only on laboratory capacity, she looked at the full chain: how the public responds to a crime scene, how law enforcement responds, what laws exist and whether they can be enforced, what the education pathway looks like for forensic scientists, and whether the funding exists to support it all. “You can’t pass a law and it’s a paper tiger if you can’t implement it at ground level,” she says.
What were the biggest obstacles in getting DNA legislation passed in South Africa?
The most predictable obstacles did not materialize. The Human Rights Commission, which Lynch expected to push back on a DNA database given South Africa’s constitutional protections and history of apartheid, ultimately supported the legislation. What derailed it, for years, was the police union. “They said that if we open it to outsourcing or to private laboratories to help with capacity building, which most countries do, it would take away their jobs,” Lynch says. That opposition stalled the process substantially.
Administrative turnover compounded the difficulty. Over the years Lynch spent advancing the legislation, South Africa went through three changes of government administration. “Every time you make progress with respect to one portfolio committee or in respect to one particular minister, they change,” she says. “And that wasn’t their priority.” The lesson she took from it: the obstacles that stop you are often not the ones you anticipated.
You have worked on DNA legislation across multiple African countries. What have you learned about how laws need to be written to actually work?
Simplicity, Lynch says, is the thing she underestimated. South Africa’s DNA Act is complicated — deliberately so, because of concerns around privacy rights and the country’s strong constitutional history. But the complexity has made it harder to implement. “The people that are reading it to try and implement it — it becomes complicated. What does this mean?” she says. Legislation she has since drafted for other countries, including Zambia, has been more straightforward, and she believes it is more likely to be successfully implemented as a result.
Her second lesson: write for change. South Africa’s act is currently before Parliament for amendments — improvements that Lynch herself identified through her PhD research. “Be prepared to evolve and change as things change, because things do change. There’s always areas of improvement,” she says.
Africa has the highest casework burden of any region and some of the most experienced forensic scientists in the world. Why aren’t those scientists presenting at international conferences?
Because they cannot afford to. Lynch wrote an article in FSG making this argument directly, noting that she was the only presenter from Africa at the ISFG conference the year it was published. “The scientists that are working in Africa are probably the most experienced scientists in the world. The casework that they deal with is probably more complex than most laboratories deal with in their lifetime,” she says. “Why aren’t they publishing? Why aren’t they presenting? Why aren’t they at places like this? Because they can’t afford it.”
The funding gap is only part of the problem. Lynch also describes a mentorship gap: scientists who secure a presentation opportunity often arrive without the preparation that turns a good idea into a compelling talk. She recalls watching a presentation from an African scientist that was technically strong but poorly structured, and thinking about the small interventions — read me your talk, cut this, practice with me — that would have changed the outcome entirely. “We don’t have enough mentors in our region to really lead them through the publication process, the supervision process,” she says.
What is the DNA for Africa platform, and what does regional collaboration in this space actually look like in practice?
Lynch started DNA for Africa because she recognized that no single country can build the infrastructure alone. The platform has grown to include a WhatsApp group of scientists and forensic experts from across the continent — west, north, east, and south — who share problems, share successes, and work through challenges together. “The camaraderie amongst everybody is just wonderful,” she says.
The longer-term goal is regional database infrastructure. Lynch is working with Interpol toward what she describes as a humanitarian database linked to African regions — a potential solution to the problem that no single country is positioned to host a central continental database. Regionally shared allele frequency databases are also under discussion. “Collaboration is the only way it’s going to work in Africa, because regionally you can’t do it alone,” she says.
You are currently running a research pilot project documenting sexual violence in conflict zones. What is the project trying to establish?
The project is in its first phase: collection and pattern analysis. Lynch is working in the DRC, where samples are being collected and analyzed with the goal of empirically establishing that sexual violence is occurring as a systematic practice. “It’s anecdotal at the moment,” she says. “And we need to kind of turn that into something that’s actionable.”
The work faces significant analytical challenges. Samples may be too degraded, too complex due to multiple perpetrators, or affected by the length of time between the assault and collection. Lynch is direct about the uncertainty: “We don’t know what we’re going to find.” The longer-term goal is to build forensic capacity in the DRC so that local databases can begin identifying perpetrators — and so that patterns in the data make it harder for governments to look away. Whether that translates into justice, she acknowledges, is not guaranteed. “It’s a start.”
Lynch has been doing this work for more than twenty years. The father whose murder started all of it was never solved. She knows the distance between having infrastructure and getting justice, and she keeps building anyway.