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Correspondence to Dr Kehinde Olawale Ogunyemi; ogunyemikehinde89@ gmail. com © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2022. Reuse permitted under CC BYNC. No commercial reuse. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ. Forecasting is an important aspect of decisionmaking in health and other social aspects of human life. Forecasting can simply be defined as the process of making probabilities about a realworld event using existing data built in a mathematical model. This understanding underpins why forecasting is sometimes used interchangeably with the word ‘modelling’. Forecasting capacity describes a system that comprises of surveillance database, experts and relevant technologies, and it remains an indispensable workforce development need for promoting datadriven decisionmaking in health, as frequently advocated by the WHO. Generally, the usefulness and usability of forecasting is one that is not unknown or unbeneficial to most people across the world, particularly in nonemergency situations, from its use in daily weather reporting through global projections on economy, and diseases burden. Similarly, from epidemiological perspective, evidence from various forecasting models was observed to have played a major role to improve emergency response in past disease outbreaks (eg, Ebola) and towards the COVID19 pandemic in the areas not limited to SARSCoV2 patterns determination, containment and mitigation measures implementation, risk communication, resource management and vaccine development. Despite the demonstrated availability of forecasting capacity and its associated benefits on health protection at the global level, unfortunately, the ownership and usage of forecasting knowledge capita in public health emergency management remain significantly limited at the regional level as laid bare by the COVID19 pandemic, with Africa being the most disproportionately impacted region, despite having a record high figure of over 100 public health emergencies annually compared with other regions of the world. This disparity in forecasting capacity is reflected in current forecasting evidence on COVID19 pandemic, where most of the studies were either conducted in the developed regions or for Africa by foreign experts such as in a study by Frost and colleagues. In addition, while anecdotal evidence shows that forecasting capacity exists in some settings in Africa such as academia, governments, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), this capacity is largely underresourced, uncoordinated and shortterm probably due to weak surveillance systems and lack of national emergency forecasting centres or forecasting units within the existing national public health institutes. Other reasons for the illdeveloped forecasting capacity in Africa could as well be attributed to the lack of political will and weak partnerships between the government and the academia, where most of the forecasting SUMMARY BOX