Advances in omics technology have the power to provide integrative models of disease risk and influence health outcomes. However, the utility of these models has so far been limited to non-African populations, due to biases in available datasets. Further, efforts to identify medically relevant genetic variants have included only a subset of known genetic variants and have had limited focus on phenotypes most relevant to Africa. Newly available genomic datasets from the African continent provide a rich opportunity to begin addressing this gap.